Deal With The Devil
by AzaleaE
Summary: I made a deal with the devil, I guess. My life, in exchange for the life of my little brother. But the devil has a sick sense of humor, and I ended up as a baby in the Naruto world. This time, I'm going to grow strong enough to protect the ones I care about. At any cost. (SI. Logical, developed world and power growth.)
1. Day 0

I don't own Naruto. I won't repeat myself every time, so that's a blanket statement for this whole fic.

This is an SI/OC insert, and will be somewhat AU as it diverges from the main storyline due to Shiori's actions. This is not an insta-God-mode! fic. Shiori will work hard for everything she accomplishes.

* * *

I made a deal with the devil.

Some intelligent, likely malevolent being was using me for its own amusement, granting my wish in a twisted sort of way. Nonsensical as it seemed, it was the only explanation I could draw from the situation. I had been going through what psychologists in my old world had called the "bargaining" stage of grief.

My brother, who was a little bit my best friend and a little bit my own child all at the same time, was dying of cancer. Horrible, _abhorrent_ disease. It took his strength and his life from him in tiny bits, and he wasted away over the course of months. I visited him every day in the hospital, putting the rest of my life aside, because I'm smart enough to know what's important in a situation like that. We laughed and joked and made plans for the future like the eventuality of him getting better was never in question, though we both knew better.

I sat beside him in what I knew were his last moments, pleading silently to anything out there that possessed the power to save him. I wanted nothing more than to trade my life for his, and die in his place. And I meant it. Because he was family, and I loved him, and he was still only a child that deserved to live. It's not that I wanted to die of cancer, don't get me wrong. But I wanted him to _live_ , more.

I don't think anything comes without a cost, and so I didn't wish for him to get better, but to take his sickness onto myself.

And as I sat there clutching his unresponsive, chilly hand, pain boiled out from my insides, literally pushing at me from the inside. I would have screamed, but I couldn't _breath_. It was terrifying and confusing, and I squeezed my brother's hand mindlessly, enough that it might have hurt, if he was awake.

Then his eyes opened, clear as they had not been for weeks, and he took a deep breath past the BiPap mask that was supposed to be helping him breath. He tugged slightly away from my hand, frowning at the pain, and sat up with the struggle of muscles weak with disuse, but not the debilitating pain of cancer-ridden, failing organs. The machines attached to him beeped wildly as his heart rate and brainwaves crested beautifully.

I pride myself on my intelligence, and keeping a cool head in the face of a crisis, and yet I'd always had that smidgeon of belief that there was some power beyond what humans could explain with science thus far in our development as a species. It didn't take more than a few seconds for me to understand what had happened.

I smiled blindingly at him, reached up my other hand, and squeezed his between both of mine. Unfortunately, without the benefit of all the drugs and life support they had him on, it also didn't take more than a few seconds for me to die.

I have no idea how long I was "out of it." When I first regained consciousness, I almost didn't even notice. I couldn't think properly. If you've ever been sleeping and tried to wake up, but been so utterly exhausted that you couldn't force yourself out of oblivion, that's what it was like. My mind couldn't handle it, so I fell back asleep.

Gradually, I pushed farther and farther through that fog, though my consciousness only seemed to grasp reality for stretches of a few seconds, and I had no way of tracking the greater passage of time. I wasn't frightened, because I didn't have the energy to be.

I began to wiggle around sometimes when I woke, pushing my limbs against my snug surroundings, and I heard garbled, muffled sounds that didn't mean anything to me. After some time of this, something happened, and the walls, such as they were, began to close in around me. Over the course of a few traumatic hours, I was _squeezed_ through a warm tunnel into blindingly bright light and cold air. It was like the times I'd crawled head first into a sleeping bag as a child, then tried to turn around and wriggle my way out blindly while the thick fabric restricted airflow. Except painful and about a hundred times more frightening.

Voices were gibbering excitedly all around me, but I was too busy screaming from the pain, fear, and overstimulation, and then from the way they manhandled me while cleaning me up. But soon, I was clean and dry and wrapped in a warm blanket, and snuggled up against a warmth that smelled soothing and spoke to me in familiar tones. Something popped into my mouth, and I started sucking, completely involuntarily. Warm liquid filled my stomach quickly, and I fell asleep.

The next few days were much of the same. There was a barrier that prevented me from being fully aware, and in the meantime my body's instincts took over. I urinated and defecated without control, cried when I was uncomfortable, and sucked on whatever was put in my mouth, only to fall asleep again, exhausted and with a seemingly constant headache from the effort of trying to think through the haze. I was hungry all the time.

There were two huge people caring for me. One was soft with a voice to match, and had a soothing smell. That one also fed me. The other was bigger and harder, and didn't feed me. It took me a few days—embarrassingly long, I admit—to understand what was going on.

They weren't huge, I was just tiny. I wasn't drugged or injured. I was a _baby_ , with a baby's mental and physical limitations. In my defense, my eyes weren't working properly, and neither were the rest of my senses. These things needed time to develop and mature, forging pathways in my infant brain.

I cried, then. It seemed this body's reaction to _anything_ was crying.

When I woke, which was often because I was hungry all the time, I tried to _think_ , to work through the implications of my discovery. My mental faculties improved rapidly, but the barrier between myself and any large thoughts was frustrating, as were the headaches trying to force myself brought on. Which, of course, caused me to cry even more.

The woman, this body's mother, I realized, would rock and sing to me, in Japanese. I didn't know the language, but I understood enough of it to recognize the sounds, and a few words and phrases. In my previous body, I had been interested in the language after discovering manga and anime as a child, and had done some self-study.

My vision and ability to concentrate improved rapidly, and it was only a few more days before I could make out the slightly blurry symbol on the jacket arm of this body's father. I found it in other places around the house, and it was obviously some kind of identifying mark of pride. It looked somewhat familiar, a circle surrounding wavy horizontal lines and short vertical ones, but I couldn't place it.

Something felt off about the whole situation, _beyond_ the fact that I seemed to have been reborn in the body of a baby, to Japanese parents. I didn't figure it out until one early evening when this body's mother and father were playing with me in the living room. While the father bounced me up and down, the mother made some weird movement with her hands that caught my eye, the fingers twisting together.

Her shadow, which was already stretching long in the light of the setting sun coming in through the window, stretched unnaturally outward and crept up the wall.

She watched me carefully, and seemed to be amused at the expression on my face. The father said something, and she nodded the affirmative, and then began to speak. I couldn't understand her words, but the cadence told me she was telling a story. As did the shadow-puppetry she was controlling on the far wall.

I was entranced for a minute or two, my tiny mind blown. Then, I understood what it meant.

I had asked to trade my life for my brother's and something had taken me up on it. Something with a sick sense of humor. Because this body's mother had just performed the Shadow Imitation jutsu, and the symbol I'd seen around the house was the Nara Clan symbol. I recognized them from one of the manga turned anime my brother and I had discovered together.

I was a baby in the "Naruto" universe.

I started crying again, this time purposefully using my powerful little lungs to scream for all I was worth.

I screamed until I exhausted myself, while this body's parents frantically tried everything they could think of to calm me down.

Reincarnation I could deal with. At least it was a possibility I'd considered. Reincarnation in a fictional universe? That was crazy. Or maybe it was one of those quantum physics things, that basically said somewhere out there, in the infinite universes, everything we could imagine existed. Which meant I could have woken up as a clown-fish with a stutter, or a newborn lion being held up over the animals of Africa by a monkey.

And if I'd traded with my brother, did that mean this was supposed to be _his_ next life? He probably would have been ecstatic, if he remembered the previous life enough to know what was going on. I'd gotten him a high-quality—but harmless—practice sword for a birthday during his most hardcore "Naruto" phase, and he'd used it until it fell apart, and begged me for shuriken.

It made me wonder if I'd really "saved" him with my sacrifice, after all. Or maybe, like I thought before, some powerful force was just having a laugh at my expense. Because I shouldn't have remembered my past life.

It took me two days to think all that through, though my ability to concentrate and stay awake was much better. My body's parents were frantic at the almost ceaseless crying. Then I calmed down, and realized I needed to adapt, and make a plan. I'd miss my family, but I had the rest of my new life to grieve.

First thing, I needed to learn the language. I was lucky. Most babies have no idea what the heck is going on. _Everything_ is new to them. But based on my previous experience, I didn't have to learn to understand the world from the beginning. I just needed to learn to talk. And to regain my motor control.

To that end, I started trying to parrot anything either of my two caregivers said to me. They were surprised and delighted. The first time, this body's mother, or Okaa-san, as I'd decided to call her so I had a simpler way of differentiating her from my own mother, yelled out excitedly for Otou-san. _"Ryouta! She's trying to talk! Get in here!"_

He rushed into the room, still holding a sugar-pot from whatever he'd been doing in the kitchen.

They talked back and forth for a few seconds, and then Okaa-san looked back down to me and said something. _"Can you show your Otou-san what you did?"_

I could tell it was a question, but I didn't know what she'd said. I did my best to repeat it to her, but I failed miserably. Babies are severely lacking in motor skills, remember? My tongue was an unruly piece of flapping muscle in my mouth, only really good for sucking.

But they didn't care. Okaa-san had turned away from the baby futon I was laying on and was laughing out loud with her shoulders thrown back and her hand over her mouth in that semi-creepy, smug way women sometimes did in animes. _"She's a genius! Take that, Sis. Yoshino-nee is going to be so jealous. My spawn will be smarter than her spawn!"_

Otou-san dropped the pot on the floor, spilling sugar everywhere. They exclaimed over me together, talking too fast for me to catch anything.

" _Do you think she understands us?"_

" _Probably not. But she's if she's smart enough to start speech mimicry this early, it won't be long before she does."_

" _Okay, okay, I want to talk to her this time."_

Then it was Otou-san's turn. He spoke, and I repeated him, and the process repeated all over, with them jumping around in joy and then returning to my futon. I tried to reach out a hand to pick up some of the sugar, but my motor skills weren't up to par, and Otou-san noticed and cleaned up the mess he'd made before I could get a taste.

My attempts to speak entertained all three of us until I fell asleep, and continued to do so for the next few days. Once again, I had an advantage, because I knew _how_ their mouths were making the sounds, and just needed to train my own to do the same.

My parents began to teach me vocabulary at that point, which I was thankful for, though of course the first thing they did was fight back and forth to get me to say Otou-san or Okaa-san before the other. I laughed to myself at their antics, because Otou-san was obvious in his efforts, while Okaa-san sneakily tried to teach me to call her that when her husband wasn't around, and acted nonchalant when he was.

I stymied them both by saying their names right after each other during one of the rare moments they were both in the room and not paying attention to me. That set off another round of excitement. I'll admit, despite the frustration of my situation, I was having fun, and already coming to love this body's parents.

Also, I learned that my name was Shiori.

I moved my body as much as possible, trying to build up my muscles and motor skills. Because being what amounted to an invalid was not fun. The movement also seemed to help distract me from the itching, _burning_ feeling inside, which started around the stomach area and spread from there. I'd gained a bit more control over my automatic cry reaction, but I could understand why kids would have colic in this world. The development of the chakra system—what else could it be—was freaking uncomfortable. Actually, the discomfort worried me a bit. I hoped it was just one of those normal painful things like teeth coming in for the first time, and not an indication that something was wrong with my body. Wouldn't it be just my luck to have deformed chakra coils or something?

After a few more weeks of practice, my tongue responded with only slight clumsiness. It wasn't perfect, but the sounds I made were mostly intelligible, and I'd already learned a bit more vocabulary. I could stay awake for longer periods, though I still needed multiple naps every day.

I did my best to seem like everything was new to me, but when you put the mind and memories of a person in their twenties into an infant, even if that infant brain can't really think on the same level, there's no way I wouldn't have been considered a genius. I guess it's good that I was reborn into the Nara clan, then. They were used to geniuses. If I was a bit beyond even that, well, hopefully at least they wouldn't be suspicious.

My concern at the moment was where I was in the timeline. I wasn't a die-hard fan of the show like my brother, so if I was in one of the pre-Naruto generations, I'd have very little relevant plotline foreknowledge. If I was _after_ the show's timeline, I was even more screwed. But as a baby with an extremely limited vocabulary, and no ability to leave my own house, I had no way to figure it out.

No matter what, though, I lived in a blatantly dangerous world, and was the daughter of two shinobi. I entertained no foolish thoughts about living a peaceful civilian life. Shinobi may live in constant danger, but at least they had some power to affect change and protect the things they cared about. Civilians just got stomped on and turned into human-pancake fodder.

Plus, in a way, I was excited. I now lived in a world with magic, basically. Chakra could do things we hadn't even come close to with science, yet. And as an _individual_ , I could affect change, because shinobi could become more powerful than hundreds of civilians put together. And if "Naruto" was to be believed, I really could do anything I set my mind to, with enough work.

* * *

4/15/16: I'm writing this story as a bit of an experiment, and a bit of a low-pressure shift from the second-in-series novel I'm writing right now. (Gods of Blood and Bone is the first, Google it if you're curious.) Basically, this is just for fun. I don't have much of anything plotted ahead of time, which is a strange feeling for me, though I've got a few ideas for events I want to happen.

If you like the story, or even if you don't, leave me a review! I love to hear from my readers.


	2. Month 2

I wasn't completely sure of the passage of time, but it seemed like about another month had passed by the time my chakra network was established, and the constant itching-burning died down. I could hold my proportionately gigantic head up on my own for more than a few seconds, and I'd begun to be able to focus visually on things beyond the length of my own arm. I was frustrated out of my mind. But there was no way I could force my body to mature faster.

Okaa-san would take me out when she went on errands, wrapping my little body in a sling facing outwards, so I could interact with the world at will. She loved to show me off to everyone we met, prompting me to "talk" to them. Otou-san was around less, and I assumed he'd returned to work, though I didn't know what he did.

I met Yoshino Nara when Okaa-san took me over to her house. Apparently they were sisters. They looked alike, each bearing the distinctive lazy expression and uneven hair line, which made me realize that my own Otou-san probably wasn't a Nara by birth. I wouldn't have recognized Yoshino right away, but I recognized her husband, Shikaku. Shikamaru's dad.

Yoshino let me put my hand on her rounded stomach when she saw my fascination. "Name?" I said in my clumsy Japanese.

She tilted her head in confusion, and turned to Okaa-san for explanation.

"Name?" I repeated. "My name is Shiori," I said carefully, hoping that would get my message across. I wanted to know if that was Shikamaru in her stomach. If so, I could cement myself in the timeline.

She laughed and shook her head, and then said something I didn't understand, then laughed again at my pout. "So smart!"

I'd heard those words more than enough times to understand them. "Nee-chan?" I asked, pointing a finger at myself.

Both Okaa-san and my aunt started laughing at that, and Yoshino nodded.

When we went home, I did my best to remember what I knew about Shikamaru and his family. As far as I know, he didn't have any siblings. So unless he'd had an older sibling that died, it should be him that would be born in a few months. _If_ this world even adhered to the way Kishimoto had told the story. I mean, I'm pretty sure _I_ wasn't in the story. As myself, or whoever Shiori Nara would have been if my brain wasn't in her.

Then a horrifying realization hit me. What if I wasn't in the story, because I'd already died by the time the main plot line started? The most likely time would have been the Kyuubi attack. Twelve years from now I would have just been one of the many who died that day—no reason to mention me in the story.

It was plausible. And I was immediately terrified. I had only a few months till then. I didn't know Shikamaru's due date, but Naruto was only slightly younger than him, and the Kyuubi would attack on the day of Naruto's birth, right?

I panicked for a few minutes, which of course overwhelmed my little body and made me start crying. Then I calmed, and took stock of the situation. Danger was on the way. Panicking was useless. What could I _do_?

I had two to three months left till Shikamaru's birth, I estimated. I'd still be an infant when the attack came. There's no way I'd be able to leave on my own. Maybe, if I could get a grasp on the language quickly enough, I could convince my parents to take me on a trip out of the village.

But what about everyone else? What about Naruto, and the fact that he'd be orphaned on that day? I'm analytical, logical to the point of coldness sometimes, even. But I wanted to be a good person, and do the right thing if I could.

I pushed away the thought that I'd be completely destroying the canon timeline, and any chance I might have to affect change later with future knowledge, because…the "greater good" is just bullshit. The end does not justify the means. If I didn't at least try to help, it would be because of cowardice, and nothing prettier.

Could I convince the adults, someone with the power to affect change, that Tobi would attack Kushina while she gave birth, then set the Kyuubi on Konoha?

With the time remaining, that was unlikely at best. But I would try.

I took a few deep breaths to calm myself, and reaffirmed my resolve to get stronger. I hated being so helpless. I mean, I couldn't sit up straight on my own for more than a few seconds!

Maybe chakra could help me. I'd been avoiding attempting anything, because I didn't want to mess with the developing pathways and screw something up. But they seemed to have stabilized, and I was desperate.

I rolled over on my little futon and tried to focus inward. I didn't know much about meditation, but it seemed like a plausible way to start finding and manipulating my chakra. Instead, I fell asleep.

Hey, I was a couple months old, and I'd had an eventful day! Babies need their sleep.

When I woke up, I stayed still, clinging to the restful feeling, and tried to access my chakra again. It wasn't that hard, honestly. There was a ball of it in my stomach, though it seemed I had a lot more yin than yang, judging by the color mix in my mind's eye. The blue chakra, which according to the anime was yang chakra, and based on the physical, was much overshadowed by the red yang chakra. Which made sense. My mental power dwarfed my physical power by an abnormal amount, for obvious reasons.

The chakra was rushing through my body, circulating through the network that had caused me so much irritation. I tried to swirl some of it in the ball in my stomach, just moving it a little to see if it responded. It didn't. So I concentrated a little harder, and a little longer, trying to clearly express my intention though thought. It worked, just a little, a ripple in the chakra that hadn't been there before, and which quickly smoothed away as my excitement caused me to break concentration.

I tried again, and this time it was easier, so I pushed a little chakra along the paths up to an arm. I didn't push any out of my tenketsu, or out of the main chakra network at all. I just directed it a little. A baby doesn't have enough chakra to waste on experimentation. For the time being, I would just work on directing it within my own body, and gaining control of its movements. Even that was exhausting, despite the fact that I wasn't really _burning_ the chakra, and after a quick meal from Okaa-san's breast while I had her read me a story, I fell back to sleep.

* * *

I couldn't change it. It had been foolish to hope that I could.

I was six months old when the Kyuubi attacked. I know, because Okaa-san had held a small party in celebration, with just her and Otou-san in attendance. I'd gotten a cupcake, which I tried to eat delicately, but was so delicious I ended up stuffing my face like the toddler I kinda was.

Otou-san had taken a picture of me with one of the rare digital cameras in this world, and then one of the three of us together, me still with frosting all over my face. Then, I'd requested story-time, which was almost always accompanied by shadow-puppetry. I'd carefully watched and memorized the hand-seals Okaa-san used for the Shadow Imitation jutsu, though I didn't dare attempt them on my own.

As the deadline for the Kyuubi attack had grown closer, I'd grown more desperate. I'd tried telling my parents, and they'd written it off as a bad dream. I'm sure my still-poor grasp on the language didn't help. When I couldn't get them to understand or believe me, I'd taken some coloring tools and one of my mom's scrolls and tried to draw out what would happen, in sequence. My motors skills were still abysmal, but I could toddle around the house with only a few falls, and with enough time and concentration, I could color legibly.

I took the picture sequence of the future to my parents, explaining each drawing in my broken Japanese as I went. The picture of the Kyuubi seemed to get their attention, but not enough. I could understand Japanese better than I could speak it, and I caught a bit of their conversation as they discussed my drawings. Otou-san thought I'd seen or heard a story about the Kyuubi which had been a little too scary for my young mind, and told Okaa-san to be careful of what I was getting into when she took me out to play, or over to other people's houses. Children are impressionable, and all that shit.

Okaa-san wasn't convinced, by either of us. But at least she looked again at my drawings and then searchingly at me. If I had more time, I could convince her. I didn't know if it would make a difference. She was only one chuunin, among a village of shinobi. But I didn't have more time, so the point was moot.

When I realized I couldn't convince them, and had no chance to affect the Kyuubi attack in the time remaining, I became jumpy and nervous.

I turned my attention back to motor skills and chakra control, because a tiny extra edge might mean the difference between life and death, if something went wrong. I didn't really believe it would make a difference, but I had to do _something_ to feel like I was making progress, or I'd go crazy.

Having chakra was obviously affecting my body. Though I was barely six months old, I was strong enough to walk on my own. That would have been possible back in my old world, but rare enough to be surprising. If I'd combined it with speaking and my intelligence, I would have been an almost unsurpassed prodigy. Here, I still _was_ a prodigy, but this was a world that had produced Hatake Kakashi and Uchiha Itachi and sent them out to fight as children. Kakashi had been _six_ when he made chuunin.

I turned my attention to my chakra one day, when Okaa-san was in a different part of the house and not paying attention. Most of the time when I played with chakra, I just pushed it around my own body, avoiding my eyes and brain because they were delicate and I was afraid to accidentally damage something. It was harder to push chakra towards my feet at first, but eventually I'd worked up enough control that I could send it anywhere in my body with a thought and a bit of concentration.

This time, I reached for it with different intent. I'd torn a few scraps of paper off one of Okaa-san's old, used scrolls, and I was going to practice a chakra control exercise. I figured the extra yin chakra I had should be enough for me to safely experiment with small things.

First, I pushed out chakra into my hand, one of the easiest places to channel it. I pooled a good amount in my palm, just to get a handle on the sensation of expelling chakra from my body, which I had avoided completely thus far. It was a bit harder than just moving chakra around inside the normal pathways. I held it cupped there for a few seconds, trying to send the clear thought that I wanted it to be sticky.

I put the piece of paper in my palm, and pieces of confetti shot upward, as if a gust of wind was blowing from my palm. Too much chakra? I picked up the pieces and examined them, trying to replay what had happened in my mind. My chakra had stuck okay, I thought, but the piece of paper had still blown away, just ripped into in pieces instead of whole. And I could already feel the drain of using that small amount of chakra.

I tried again, trying to get a feel for how much chakra I was actually using. I took the original amount and divided it by two, and two again, and after a thought, divided it by two again. Better to use too little and just add more than waste my precious chakra reserves. Nothing happened when I dropped the next piece of paper in my palm. Which…was _good_ , I guessed. When I turned my palm downward, the paper did not fall.

"Haha!" I crowed to myself. Then the paper fell, but I was too busy feeling gleeful to care. Despite everything else going on in this world, chakra was amazing.

I adhered the paper to my hand again, after carefully measuring out the proper amount of chakra, this time holding it there. Then I began to experiment with exactly how much chakra I could use without the paper falling. To a certain degree, it was kind of like using Post-It-Note glue versus super glue. Either one would make the paper stick, but one used way less chakra than the other, while conversely requiring more control. However, after I moved above a certain amount of chakra, the paper couldn't handle it, and despite the, "be sticky!" command I gave my chakra, the paper would blow away. The more chakra I used, the smaller the pieces of confetti, almost as if the chakra was trying to stick to the paper and make it into a projectile at the same time, thus destroying it.

If I lost concentration, the paper would fall immediately. The longer I practiced, the harder it got to concentrate. And even though it was only a piece of freaking paper, it was surprisingly exhausting. I'm not sure if that's because my chakra levels were puny, or if I was wasting chakra through inefficiency. Probably both.

After I was exhausted—which took a laughably short amount of time—I carefully gathered all the tiny pieces of confetti I'd created, toddled over to the window, drug a chair to the wall so I could reach the window latch, and threw the confetti out the window before closing it again and returning the chair to its place. Hopefully, neither Okaa-san or Otou-san would notice. You never know, with ninja.

I practiced whenever I got the chance over the next few days, tiring myself out consistently. Okaa-san asked me if I was feeling okay, and I overheard her telling Otou-san that she thought I might be getting sick, because I was sleeping way more than usual, and wouldn't be woken.

"I found her sleeping on the coffee table!" she said to him one evening in the kitchen while cooking dinner.

I facepalmed, listening around the corner. That had not been my finest moment. I'd been practicing in the living room while Okaa-san was out getting groceries, and ended up exhausting myself. I'd been so focused I hadn't realized she was home until I heard her opening the front door. The surprise made me jump and let out a burst of chakra that absolutely shredded the piece of paper I'd been sticking to my hand. I'd scrambled on top of the glass-topped coffee table to get the remaining pieces, stuffing them into my mouth in panic because I didn't have time to dispose of them elsewhere.

By the time I realized I'd probably overdone the training a bit, I was already slumping down on top of the cool glass, unable to keep my eyes open. Sleep and food both helped to regenerate chakra, I was learning quickly as I shoveled food into my mouth at dinner that evening.

"Shiori-chan, your mother tells me you've been feeling extra sleepy lately," Otou-san mentioned gently. "You fell asleep on the coffee table? Were you too tired to make it to your futon for a nap?" His face and tone both held only neutral curiosity, and if I'd really been a child, I probably wouldn't have noticed the carefully controlled worry.

Mentally, I kicked myself. My parents were smart. Obviously, they would notice a change in my behavior. It's not that random naps, even in strange places, would be so weird for the average infant. But I wasn't the average infant. And Okaa-san hadn't been able to wake me.

But then I had an idea. "Troublesome," I muttered around a mouthful of rice. "I was hot after playing. The coffee table was cool." My expression was faintly irritated, and I carefully kept eating, not looking at either of them.

Just like that, Otou-san started sputtering.

I looked up, and saw him red-faced as he failed to stop himself from busting out in laughter. He held his side feebly and pointed at Okaa-san. " _Troublesome_!" he gasped. "She's your child."

Okaa-san looked a little miffed, but when she saw my look of curiosity, she couldn't help but laugh, too. Because, where else would I have picked up that oh-so-Nara expression? She muttered it to herself all the time.

I smiled widely at both of them, and started laughing, too, childlike and innocent.

The Kyuubi attacked that night.

I'd slept fitfully at best for the last week or so, knowing that it would be soon. Shikamaru had been born, and the stress was making me crazy. When I woke, both Okaa-san and Otou-san were still asleep in their own, adult sized futon across the room from me.

I could feel the _wrong_ -ness in the air. I threw off the cover of my futon and scrambled over to my parents. "Okaa-san, wake up!"

I shook her, and she woke immediately, along with Otou-san.

"Bad fox, Nine-tails," I said, cursing my lack of Japanese. "Hurry, it's not safe."

Okaa-san's eyes widened, and she shared a look with Otou-san. "Do you feel that?"

"The Nine-tails!" he repeated, as if I hadn't said it just seconds ago. "Oh, shit."

The sirens started, then. I didn't know the signals well enough to decipher them, but my parents in this world shared a look, and then they were scrambling out of the futon, dressing in a flash, grabbing me and the emergency packs they kept always ready to go.

"She knew," Okaa-san muttered. "Remember those drawings?"

"You think she—" Otou-san broke off, staring at me for only a second before he shook his head. "It doesn't matter now. Take Shiori to the shelters," he instructed. "I'm going to the east wall."

Okaa-san paled, but nodded. "I love you. Be safe."

Something about their expressions stirred the panicky dread in my stomach. The east wall? Was that where the Kyuubi was attacking?

Otou-san leaned down and placed a kiss on my forehead. "Be strong, Shiori-chan. I love you,"

I was crying soundlessly, and wrapped my arm around his neck before he could pull away. "Safe, Otou-san," I whimpered. "Be safe."

He gently unwrapped my arms and handed me back to my mother. "I love you," he said to her.

Then he was gone with the swirling air of a shunshin. He had not made any promises he wouldn't be able to keep, I noticed.

Okaa-san dashed away, too, jumping to a nearby rooftop and leaping away, no time lost to sentimentality. She was a ninja, too. She knew her priorities.

As she jumped in the direction of the cliff wall with me strapped securely to her chest in case she needed the use of both her arms, I caught glimpses of the Kyuubi in the distance. Its chakra was oppressive, almost a physical presence in the air that made me want to choke, throw up dinner, and shrivel up into a ball and die all at the same time.

Luckily, all I did was throw up, all down Okaa-san's back.

She didn't notice. Or if she did, she didn't care.

I caught the tiny forms of Konoha's shinobi racing toward it's gargantuan form. This place had only been my home for a few months, but I still felt a fierce pride at their selflessness. The Will of Fire and all that. They had to know they were racing toward their own deaths. Most of them would be nothing more than a distraction for the Kyuubi. The number of shinobi who could fight on par with the Nine-tails was miniscule.

And yeah, I know that shinobi here are trained from birth to find honor in protecting their home, and even giving their lives for it, but it's not so different in the US. There _was_ honor in what they were doing, that night. Protecting what they loved. I wished I could do the same.

We arrived at the Hokage monument soon, and with a whispered, "I'm going to help your father. I'll be back soon. I love you, Shiori," she handaed me off to an adult I didn't know and shunshined off with a swirl of dirt.

I really hated those words. Why did the people I loved always tell me, "I love you," right before they were going to die? Don't tell me you love me, and in exchange, just _live_!

The person Okaa-san handed me to brought me to a group of other children, huddled in a cave in the side of the cliff. There were only a few adults, so I assumed that this was a group of shinobi children, whose parents were all out fighting the demon. How many of them would be orphans after tonight?

I toddled to the corner and curled up with my hands wrapped around my knees. Kids were crying, and that horrible, demonic chakra was surging through the air in waves, even stronger now. I couldn't breath. I was going to die, I knew it. I couldn't handle it, I was dying, dying, _dying_ …

With a gasp, I reached inward and flared my chakra, circulating it around my body for all I was worth. It pushed against the demonic chakra, and I could breath a little. The feeling of death reaching out for me receded a bit. I swirled my chakra faster, pushing my defiance farther. It helped. I was still terrified. And I'd peed my diaper out of terror. But I could handle it now.

That went on for a long time. I don't know how long; I had no way of keeping track.

Finally, though, the Kyuubi's chakra receded, taking the horrible oppression with it. I didn't trust the respite. What if it wasn't really gone? Was it a trick to get me to lower my guard? I kept my chakra flared, just in case.

Or, I tried to. What actually happened is I passed out. From chakra exhaustion, maybe. Keeping it within the body conserved it, but when flaring it, some still leaked out of the tenketsu unavoidably. Add in extended terror and exhaustion and the body of a six month old, and…yeah.

I woke up in the orphanage a few days later.

* * *

4/16/16: **This is NOT a, "Main Character Lives at the Orphanage with Naruto and Becomes a Friend/Older Sibling to Him," story.** Keep reading, and you'll see.

4/15/16: I'm still having fun.

For those of you who noticed, the chapter titles are the length of time Shiori's been in the "Naruto" world/her age at the start of said chapter. Time, of course, moves on during it. In this case, four months passes.

Talk to me, readers! I want to know what you think.


	3. Month 6

I was at the orphanage because my parents were dead. No one bothered to explain it to me. I don't think anyone even knew I would have been able to understand them, if they did. Not that it was the adult's fault. I was only one kid among many who suddenly found themselves without parents, and the orphanage employees were worked to the bone trying to suddenly take care of all of us.

No, I figured it out on my own. It wasn't that hard to deduce. Why else would I be there?

I was devastated. My biggest fear has always been losing those I love somehow. I may have saved my little brother's life, but I would never see him again, never share those life experiences with him. And now, I'd just begun to love my new family, and they were gone, too.

I was silent, almost unresponsive to the exhausted orphanage workers, when I wasn't jumping in fright at their presence, and in return they left me alone. But inside, I was a seething mass of frustrated rage and paranoid terror. I had been so, _so…useless._ This world was full of terrible danger, to me and everything and anything I might grow to care about.

I'd already planned on training to become stronger, but the Kyuubi attack changed something about that resolution. It became an integral part of me. I would become stronger. I would protect those I cared about.

I also became a paranoid, twitchy little thing. I couldn't sleep properly. Every movement of shadow in the room or sound one of the other kids made woke me. I tracked the movement of everyone in close proximity, even if I wasn't looking at them.

I practiced my paper sticking technique constantly, except I didn't always have access to paper, now. So I stuck my hand to my blanket, or to the wall, or my own clothes. Different textures and weights made a difference, and I learned to adjust my chakra accordingly. I was getting better. I wasted less chakra when expelling it, and I wasn't sure, but I thought my reserves had grown a tiny bit, too.

I wasn't at the orphanage long, which actually surprised me. I guess maybe it shouldn't have.

I was sitting in the orphanage play yard away from the other children, practicing sticking a blade of grass to my hand when I three people came up behind me. Two of them were strong. I tensed, for no real reason, because fear isn't always logical.

But when I turned and saw Yoshino-oba and Shikaku-oji walking toward me beside the orphanage director, I wasn't sure if I should smile or not. It seemed like it would be just the thing for me to jump for joy, expecting them to take me away, and then to be disappointed because they'd only come to formally tell me that my parents had died, and I would be staying here forever.

Instead, they told me that I would be coming home with them now.

I shook my head at that, negating their apologies. The village was half-destroyed, they had a newborn of their own to take care of, and I had been perfectly fine waiting a week in the orphanage while they did damage control.

When Yoshino picked me up and cradled me in her arms, tucking my little head under chin, I started to cry, though.

"Sorry…" I sniffled, rubbing at my eyes with a fist.

"Shush, baby," she murmured, rubbing my back. "Everything's okay now. You're coming with us and you're safe. I'm sorry it took so long for us to find you. But you were brave, so brave. It's okay now."

Of course, that only made me cry all the harder. She smelled a little like Okaa-san.

I saw Danzo Shimura for the first time through a haze of tears. He didn't take more than cursory notice of me, for which I was grateful. The fear dried my tears right up. He'd been a frightening character to me when I first saw the anime. An insidious force, working like a virus from within Konoha. He grabbed up the vulnerable, the weak, and those who could be useful to him. Kids.

He was walking toward the orphanage.

Suddenly, I was terrified. It was becoming a familiar feeling. If he ever learned what I knew, I would be in horrible danger. Knowledge of the future would be an invaluable asset for him. Hell, even a shinobi-in-training with a brain like mine would be snapped up like the last piece of meat in a starving wolf pack.

As I was, I was vulnerable to him. I couldn't reveal anything I knew until I had the power to protect myself. If Kishimoto's rendition of the future was correct, I couldn't even trust the adults around me to stop him.

"Ahh!" I squeaked. What about the drawings I'd done of the Kyuubi attack? They were evidence against me. Unlikely evidence, to be sure, but if he somehow got ahold of them… I pushed away from Yoshino-oba's neck. "We go…my house, please?"

She looked at my pityingly. "We're going to your _new_ house, Shiori-chan."

"No. We go… _my_ house. Hurry. We go new house after." I nodded adamantly, and added, "I'm okay." I seemed to have gotten my point across, because she sighed, shared a look with her husband, and nodded.

The sight of my house caused mixed feelings, to say the least. I mean, I didn't have to worry about anyone finding my drawings. But that was mostly because the house didn't exist any more. Along with most of the street. I stared wide-eyed at the unbelievable destruction for a moment. It looked like a natural disaster had struck.

Yoshino-oba and Shikaku-oji shared a look over my head that I almost missed in my horror. Shikaku put an arm around her. "We _did_ find her," he said cryptically, but I was too busy looking at the devastation to think about it.

I guess that's what the Tailed Beasts were, in this world. Natural disasters.

"We go new house," I said quietly, and re-buried my head in the crook of Yoshino-oba's neck.

When we got to their house set me up a little futon in the corner of their room, and told me that I could have my own room, next to Shikamaru's, when I was bigger.

I was grateful, but it took me a long time to settle in. I had a lot of nightmares, and I didn't lose the habit of tracking the location of everyone around me in the back of my mind. It helped me to relax, when I knew there would be no surprises, no people sneaking up behind me. Other than the nightmares and the fact that I was a bit too withdrawn, at times, I was the perfect child.

I didn't cry, I didn't whine, and other than pestering Oba-chan and Oji-san to read to me all the time, I didn't bother them. It bothered oba-chan, as Yoshino asked me to call her, I think.

She found me on a chair in the kitchen, making myself some food once, and immediately rushed over and helped me to the ground. "Why didn't you come ask me for help?" she demanded. "It's dangerous to climb to high places!"

"I no want to bother you. And I can help myself. I'm okay," I grumbled. I sidled around her and retrieved my food from the counter, before crawling onto one of the kitchen chairs and kneeling on it to eat my snack at the table. I mean, I know my body was small. But I'm a grown woman. I wasn't even using the knives!

She stared at me for a while, then rushed out of the room.

I felt bad, because I heard her crying later after I left the kitchen.

"She feels like she can't depend on me!" she sniffled to Shikaku. "She's not even a year old and she's going around making her own meals because she thinks she's a bother. What are we doing _wrong_?"

I focused harder on them, trying to spy without giving my location away.

Shikaku hugged her and murmured soothingly for a while, and then finally said, "Mahh, we'll just have to make her see that she's family."

After that, they both made a point to hug me more, and point out that Shikamaru was my brother, and have "family time" in the evening. Yoshino even said that I could call her, "Okaa-chan," if I wanted.

I didn't want to, because just like I already had a "Mom," back in my old word, I already had an "Okaa-san," here. I shook my head. "I love you even if I don't call you 'Okaa-chan,' Yoshino-oba-chan," I said with a small smile. Yes, it was blatant manipulation, using my cuteness as a weapon.

She looked surprised, but she smiled back, and let me sit on her lap while she read me a picture book.

I was learning to read surprisingly quickly.

* * *

I'd been living with my aunt and uncle for six months before I realized something that should have been obvious. My birthday had just passed, which meant I'd been in the "Naruto" world for a year. Or more, if I counted the vague memories I had of being in Okaa-san's womb.

In any case, it would be about twelve more years before the main events of Kishimoto's canon kicked off, and my future-knowledge became useful. The problem with this, was that twelve years is a long time, and I was going to forget things. I already had forgotten things from when I first watched the anime and then read the manga, before even coming to this world. Since then, I'd probably lost even more. Details that could be critical were slipping away from me!

"Oji-san," I said one afternoon while Shikaku, baby Shikamaru, and I were watching the clouds together. "Are there other languages besides ours?" From what I remembered, the "Naruto" universe had basically one continent. And they all spoke Japanese.

"There are codes, and ciphers, but as far as I know, everyone speaks our language. I believe, a long time ago, before some of the islands to the west had been discovered, they had a different language, though we shared some similarities," he answered in a bored tone.

"So…if we found another language, like carved into a stone or something, and nobody knew where it came from, could we figure out what it said?"

He considered for a moment. "Ehh, maybe…it would be a huge project, though. We'd have to devote a lot of the manpower of the Intelligence Division to it, over a long period of time, and even then we might not get anywhere. Why?" He turned to me with his too-intelligent eyes.

I shrugged, carefully casual. "Secret codes sound fun! But most of them seem like they'd be easy to crack. I thought maybe if they were based off of something completely different, it would make them more secure." I knew Oji-san knew I was smart, but in this case, the truth was far-fetched enough that I was safer to get as close to it as possible. He was good at spotting lies.

He laughed. "Oh, and what super important secrets would you be needing to hide in code?" Despite the question, his gaze held no suspicion. I mean, come on. I was a toddler. What secrets could I possibly have?

I scowled at him. "Well, I'm not going to tell _you_!"

He only laughed harder at that, which caused baby Shikamaru to start laughing as well, a cute little gurgle that drew Oji-san's attention.

A couple days later, when Yoshino-oba took me with her shopping, I wandered off in one of the stores to look at notebooks. When she came looking for me, she found me with a couple hardbound, blank books.

"I want a diary, Oba-chan. Could it be a late birthday present? I need one to write about my day, and one to write stories in…" I held up the books, which were almost comically large in the grip of my pudgy fingers.

"Shiori-chan, you haven't even started learning how to write yet," she said, shifting Shikamaru distractedly on her hip.

"I'll learn!" I pleaded, staring up at her with wide eyes and a pout. Being a cute toddler had to have some advantages, after all. "Please?"

She relented, and I got a couple pens as well as the notebooks.

I didn't start writing in them immediately, mostly because when I took out the notebooks and pens that night, I found the hand-eye coordination needed to form legible letters was a skill I didn't yet have. I didn't really enjoy coloring and other such things normal kids did to build that hand-eye coordination, though I could do it if I took my time and concentrated.

But for small, straight letters, the difficulty was even higher. I was just glad I'd be writing in English, and not Japanese. At least I already knew how to form the letters, and there were no delicate kanji.

With a deep sigh, I ripped a blank sheet from one of the notebooks and set to practicing. My letters were slow and painstakingly formed, as I tried to get them legible while still making them as small as I preferred. I didn't succeed that evening, but I tried again the next, and the next. I even set aside some of my precious chakra-training time for it. When I filled the paper, I shredded it with chakra and disposed of the confetti, and did the same to the papers I practiced English on after that.

I asked Oji-san and Oba-chan to help me learn how to write during the day. Oji-san tried to avoid the extra work, at first, but Yoshino-oba got angry and scolded him that he'd better spend tim with "his kids," especially when they specifically asked. They taught me the Japanese writing system, of course, but the practice was still relevant. My hands and forearms almost hurt from the amount stress I was putting them through.

It took about a week, but my new body learned quickly. Chakra made a difference in everything, even when I wasn't actively manipulating it. I doubted I would have been able to advance so quickly in my old word, no matter how determined I was.

When I was ready, I once again pulled out the notebooks, and after organizing my thoughts, began to write. It took me another week to get all the information down. In the first notebook, I put everything I could remember about the "Naruto" universe, topic by topic, along with a timeline for events in the story. As I went, I remembered more and more, almost like when you try to remember your dream, and when you grasp one event, it leads you to another you didn't even know you'd forgotten.

I hadn't been a Naru-tard, but I'd enjoyed the show and the manga, and had discussed them plenty with my brother. And I was _smart_. Had been smart before, too, even without my new Nara brain. I remembered _plenty_. It was only the later events that grew hazy, as I had become busy with real life and had less time to keep up with new chapters. For the events at the very end, I only had a few conversations with my excited little brother to go on. I hoped it would be enough.

Perhaps, with my presence here changing things, my lack of concrete wouldn't even matter by the time those intervening years had passed.

In the second notebook, I had a bit of fun. Well, my version of fun, anyway. I wrote down information about my skill levels, as accurately as I could, from when I'd first started practicing with chakra six months ago till then. I'd been working hard, a few hours every day. For a toddler, that was a lot.

When I had started, I had been able to hold one scrap of paper to the palm of my hand for about half a minute before my concentration broke. I'd practiced until I could hold a piece there for almost half an hour. I could attach the palms of my hands to almost anything, now, though if it was too heavy or difficult to move, the connection would break for lack of sufficient chakra reserves when I pulled away.

I'd found that the palms of my hand were the easiest to direct chakra through, which probably also had something to do with why hand-seals worked so well to direct chakra when performing jutsu. But I could mold chakra elsewhere, with a bit of extra effort. I hadn't even bothered attempting it with the feet, yet, but I could stick a piece of paper or a leaf to any spot on either of my arms. My forehead, too.

I couldn't be absolutely sure because I had no way to measure it objectively, but I thought my chakra reserves had doubled. Some of that probably came from growing, but I thought my training had a large impact as well. When I'd gotten to the point that I couldn't wear myself out with the leaf-sticking exercise after close to an hour, I'd moved on to two leaves, one in each hand.

It was quite a bit harder, splitting my concentration and my chakra like that, but I saw quick improvement from the extra effort, both in my skill, and my chakra reserves.

I'd been trying to push myself physically as well, but I was still far from being ready to start any real physical training, and I didn't want to strain my growing body.

After recording my accomplishments thus far, I moved onto goals for my future, both near and far. Honestly, the options were a little bit overwhelming.

I was interested in medical jutsu. I never again wanted to be helpless while someone I loved was hurt or sick. With all the chakra control training I was doing, I should have the necessary control to handle the techniques, but if medics were anything like doctors back in my old life, I'd need a crazy amount of theoretical training and knowledge. But I didn't want to be sidelined as a medic. I wanted to fight, not be ordered to put my own life first because my healing abilities were too valuable for the team to lose.

Taijutsu was a given, then, but I didn't think I had what it took to be as powerful as I would need to be, simply as a taijutsu specialist. I needed to be able to keep up with people like _Madara_ , eventually. Besides, if I was enough of a heavy-hitter, a little medical knowledge wouldn't be enough to sideline me.

I didn't know what type of chakra reserves I'd have the in future, but I'd have to do my best to build them up. Extra chakra was always a good thing in a fight. And even the simplest ninjutsu could be used to great affect, with a little creativity. I wanted to test my chakra nature. And as far as yin vs. yang, at the moment I was definitely yin-heavy. Didn't genjutsu rely on yin chakra?

I'd have to see about a summon contract. I didn't know too much about the possibilities there, so I would need to do some research, but from what I'd seen of the show, they could be invaluable, and maybe even teach me things the shinobi wouldn't, or couldn't.

Kekkei Genkai were out, for obvious reasons. I mean, as far as life-hacks go, I think my future knowledge and years of mental experience were enough. I had no need to steal someone else's eye and transplant it into my face. Or my arm. Gross.

But to be honest, the thing that interested me the most at the moment was fuinjutsu. It seemed like an amazingly versatile tool, only limited by the knowledge and ingenuity of the wielder. With it, I might be able to do things through preparation and study that would be impossible for me to do yet with straight up ninjutsu or chakra manipulation.

Plus, it looked really cool in the anime.

The problem with fuinjutsu is that I didn't know the first thing about how it actually worked, and I didn't know who I could get to teach me. The anime had made it look like a bunch of ink scribbles, usually based around a legible kanji, but I'd bet money the ink scribbles were _supposed_ to be more than that.

Did Konoha have a library? I'm pretty sure it did. In fact, there were probably several places where information of varying sensitivity was stored. But as for the public library, which civilians would have access to, would it have anything useful about fuinjutsu?

Wait…I was living in the house of the Nara clan head. A clan famed or its members' intelligence. Shikaku-oji would have scrolls about various things. It was more than likely that some of them would be useful to me. With that thought, I hid my notebooks in my room, under my futon, because as cliché as that hiding spot was, I didn't have anywhere better to put them. Hopefully, no one would be searching through my room looking for something suspicious in the first place.

He was away at work for the moment, and I could hear Yoshino-oba downstairs with Shikamaru, so I opened the door to his study. He didn't have a huge selection of texts, but plenty of scrolls sat in little cubby-bookcases along the walls.

I had trouble reading the labels on the ones higher up, and though there were a few scrolls that looked interesting, on some medical techniques and deer care, there was nothing for a beginner level reader, and I had no dictionary. Even if I had a dictionary, I'd need likely need the introductory texts before I could understand some of the more advanced topics.

With a sigh, I returned the scrolls to their cubbies, and left Shikaku-oji's study. I would have to find another source of information. The Nara clan as a whole probably had a library of sorts, for ourselves. I remembered something about Tsunade using one of the medical text to figure out how to save Choji from his three-coloured-pill overdose.

I would have to find a way to get into it.

* * *

5/1/16: Please take a moment to review, guys. I love hearing from you.


	4. Year 1

I considered just _asking_ for the texts I wanted. Would it be so suspicious for me to be interested in basic medical ninjutsu and fuinjutsu? Maybe Oba-chan would take me to the Nara archives, or even the civilian library, _willingly_.

Then I remembered that I'd only turned one a few weeks ago, and considered what my reaction would have been if a one-year-old asked me for beginner medical, computer programming, or applied chemistry texts. Which is basically the level of what I wanted.

No…I wouldn't ask. Even if they let me, something like that would draw the kind of attention I didn't really want until I was strong enough to back up the hype. Danzo liked geniuses. And I was vulnerable.

So I either had to wait till I was older, or find a way to get what I wanted in secret. I figured I could legitimately ask for texts like those in another two years or so, maybe three, if I didn't want to attract _too_ much attention.

Obviously, I wasn't going to wait. Not longer than I had to, to make a plan, prepare, and execute said plan, anyway. But I wouldn't rush unnecessarily, either. I still needed to learn more kanji, as my reading comprehension of Japanese wasn't high enough to understand medical texts, which would probably hold true for most of the things I really wanted to learn.

And I'd need time to do recon, and build up my physical strength more, as an outing of any kind still exhausted my little body, and even without anything extra tiring I slept about fifteen hours a day. I didn't have the skills necessary to get what I wanted on my own, anyway.

With a huff of frustration, I went back to my room, and took out my skill notebook again. No matter what, all shinobi worked off of similar building blocks. If I could build up that foundation early, I'd make my work easier in the future. With a deep sigh, I plopped my head onto my forearms and admitted that I might be getting ahead of myself, wishing to learn advanced things without a proper base skill set already in place.

I took up my pen, and began to make a rough schedule. I slept about fifteen hours a day, as I said. Another four of those were taken up by eating, bathing, and the daily maintenance that came with being alive. At least I didn't need to wear a diaper any more! Though in exchange, I was always scurrying away to the bathroom, because I had a minuscule bladder.

That left me with five free hours a day, with which to accomplish something. I'd already been working hard, but I liked schedules, even if I didn't always stick to them, so I wrote out my plan.

And for the next few months, I followed it. After breakfast, I'd go outside and play close to the house. Or, really, it was physical training disguised as play. I'd kick around a ball, or chase bugs, or even occasionally play with one of the other clan kids. It was surprisingly…fun. Disguising it as play seemed to _make_ it play, even in my own mind.

After an hour of that, I'd stretch and go back inside for my first nap of the day. When I woke up, I'd eat again, then go back to my room or back outside for chakra exercises. I advanced to two pieces of paper at once, on varying parts of my body. It made it even harder if the places were asymmetrical, such as one piece on my forearm, and the other on my stomach. I tried to use up a good portion of my chakra every day, while staying away from absolute exhaustion, because my reserves seemed to grow more quickly when I did so.

An hour of that, and then I'd take my next nap. Then I'd work on my reading comprehension and my Japanese writing skill, sometimes with my aunt or uncle, and sometimes alone. Then I'd have a snack, and alternate going back outside to play, or doing more chakra exercises for about a half hour. Then, the third nap of the day. In my remaining hour and half, I spent time with the family, or playing with Shikamaru.

My schedule got disrupted often. Which wasn't surprising, because no one even knew I had a schedule, and if they did, I don't think they would have placed much importance on it. At first, it made me tense, as I thought about all the work I should be doing, the progress I should be making. And then, I let it go. Having fun in life was important, otherwise, when it came time to use all that training I'd been doing to protect what I cared about, I'd find that in fact, there _was_ nothing I cared about.

After a couple months, I realized that I was being silly. "Oba-chan," I asked, "can we go to the library? I want to get some books."

And with only a few words of praise for me, Yoshino took me to the public library. I didn't go after any of the actually interesting books or scrolls, but this gave me the opportunity to check out the library for future reference. I picked out a few books in my reading level. There were actually a few informative picture books about the shinobi lifestyle, and one about which plants and animals around Konoha were either useful or should be avoided.

I was reading a book about famous ninja of the past, with Yoshino there to be my dictionary when I found a kanji I couldn't read, or a word I didn't know. I sighed and put the book away. "Oba-san's friends brought their babies," I said. "It's probably going to get too loud to keep reading."

Yoshino looked at me oddly, but sure enough, Shikaku and his friends burst through the door, the mother's carrying toddlers. It was my first time meeting Chouji and Ino. I guessed this was a playdate for the kids, while the adults would hang out and relax together. It had probably been a while since they got to do that, what with the stress of rebuilding after the Kyuubi attack, along with that of being new parents.

"How did you know?" Yoshino-oba asked me.

I had already started to shrug when I paused and frowned. I always kept track of the people around me, ever since the Kyuubi attack. It was something I didn't even notice myself doing, any more. But this wasn't simply being aware of my surroundings. I hadn't heard or seen them. So how had I known they were coming, let alone bringing their children with them? My eyes widened, and I met Yoshino-oba's again. "I _felt_ them?"

She seemed to be considering something, but I didn't know what. "We'll talk about this later, Shiori-chan." Then she hustled off to make our guests welcome, while the three fathers sat watching the three younger kids play, laughing among themselves.

"Won't be long before we've got ourselves another generation of the famous Ino-Shika-Cho team." Chouza said.

Shikaku nodded lazily. "It's a given."

"I'll bring Choji over often. They'll become great friends," Chouza said.

Inoichi noticed me listening. "Hmm…I'm sure Shiori-chan is excited for her own shinobi team," he said. "I'm sure some of the other members of our clans have kids your age as well. Don't worry, you won't be left out."

That irritated me. Just because I was a Nara, were they going to type-cast me? Was the Ino-Shika-Cho team really already set in stone for their children, in their minds? I wondered how much grades actually had to do with the team formations, in the canon "Naruto." Supposedly, the teams were supposed to be even in terms of skill, but were they really? Surely, the influential leaders of three of Konoha's clans had enough sway to influence where their children were put. And here they were, already trying to direct their children's friendships.

"No," I said clearly, staring right back at Inoichi. "I'm not going to be on an Ino-Shika-Cho team."

"Whaaat?" Chouza laughed heartily, leaning back and smacking his stomach. "Why not? Everyone knows we three clans make a great team. We've been allies since before Konoha was even founded."

Shikaku didn't seem much affected, but I noticed his eyes were trained intelligently on me, and Inoichi didn't even try to disguise his interest.

"I am more than my name," I said. "And more than the history of my parents. _I_ will walk my own path."

"Mahh, if that's what you want…" Shikaku shrugged. But he was _watching_ me. I didn't know if it was suspicion, exactly, but I'd revealed a bit too much of my personality. I'd said words I shouldn't, expressed views a bit too opinionated, and a bit too articulate, even for a genius.

Inoichi stared at me for a bit, turned contemplatively to the trio of infants, and then shared a look with Shikaku. I knew they had both noticed my emphasis, and I wondered if my words would change anything.

Chouza laughed again. "Spirited little thing, isn't she? Haven't seen a Nara like her since old lady Shikarin. Like a demon, she was!"

I turned away, trying to disguise my irritation, and slip back into the role of a child. Well, if they really _were_ going to try and force yet another Ino-Shika-Cho team, I couldn't do anything. But I would be sure to show Shikamaru as he grew that there were other options, if he wanted them.

* * *

About a week after the get-together, I was outside playing when someone snuck up behind me. Or rather, they tried to sneak up behind me.

I was hunched over, channeling chakra toward my feet, when I felt a presence. They were _close,_ and I hadn't heard them coming. I hadn't understood at first that my blind spot awareness was anything more than unconscious observation, until the get-together. I shouldn't have known who was outside the front door. In the intervening days, I'd tested it out a little, and realized that I was most likely an extremely weak chakra sensor.

But this was different than most of the times I sensed people. The person behind me felt almost as if they had thrown a muffling sheet over themselves, or were walking around in an astronaut suit. That doesn't make sense. But basically, they were muted. Muffled.

And creeping toward me from the cover of the trees overhead.

I was well away from the edge of the Nara forest, but there were still plenty of smaller trees everywhere. This _was_ the village of the Leaf, after all. I stood up and stretched, then turned around casually, scanning for the presence. I couldn't see anyone.

I looked around on the ground level, and saw that I was alone. Often, other clan kids or Shikamaru would be outside around this time of day, but I'd moved away from them to more inconspicuously practice my chakra control. My heartbeat picked up speed. No witnesses.

I turned and walked back toward my house. I didn't run, because I didn't want to let whoever it was know that I was on to them. Had I done something to bring myself to Danzo's attention? Maybe, someone had noticed my chakra control exercises. I'd been stupid to do them outside! I clenched my fists in frustration. I'd been trying to keep secrets from my family, but in doing so, had left myself open to discovery from others.

I couldn't outrun a shinobi, but if I caught them off guard, a sudden burst of speed or a scream might save me. I looked straight ahead, but pushed out my senses as far as I could. I couldn't reach very far at all. Two meters before people grew hazy. Four before they winked out of my perception all together. I was slightly better with people I knew well, whose chakra I was attuned to.

Another presence flashed around in front of me. It was cutting off my path, though they remained hidden in a tree above.

I couldn't help my little jerk of surprise. Shit, shit, shit.

They, too, were muffled. And as shinobi, they would know from my jump that I knew they were there. I didn't have much time. How far was I from the house? How far from people?

I was breathing hard, my heart pounding so fast it was almost making me dizzy. Calm down. I had to figure out a way out of this. I angled my path to the side, between my two tree-stalkers, so that I was no longer walking right toward the one in front. I had no weapons on me. I didn't even _own_ any. I couldn't run away faster than them. I could stick a leaf to pretty much anywhere on my body, and I had just started trying to teach myself to tree-walk. Nothing _useful_!

My pursuers rotated around me, and drew closer, once again cutting of my path forward and backward.

I reached down while walking and picked up a short, broken stick from the ground. It fit well in my tiny fist, just thick enough not to break if I jammed it like a kunai into…one of their eyes, maybe.

Then I turned slightly again and started running, straight toward my house. Yoshino-oba was inside, I knew. I screamed, as loud as I could. " _Yoshino! Fire!_ " Hopefully, she heard me. And I'd heard sometime back in my old life that yelling, "Fire," was more effective than screaming for help, if you actually needed help.

Both presences flashed in front of me, and one slid out of the tree, most of their body hidden behind the trunk.

I turned again, slipping and catching myself with a hand on the ground, but I didn't stop running. " _Yoshino! Help!_ " Stupid, stupid short stubby legs. Why couldn't I go any faster? _Why_ didn't I carry a weapon?

Then, both presences flashed in front of me again, this time landing on the ground.

I skidded, moving another turn, almost losing my balance. But suddenly, it was Yoshino and Shikaku in front of me, flaring bright with familiarity, and the other presences were gone. I still ran a good few steps away before taking another look at them. They looked like my family, but I wasn't stopping for a possible henge trying to trick me. It might be a trick that they _felt_ like my family, too.

I ran all the way back to the house without stopping, slamming into the back door and stumbling inside after making sure it was shut securely behind me. "Oba-chan," I called out, almost sobbing, "Oba-chan, where are y—"

I stopped, as I felt her behind me. I turned around.

She and Shikaku opened the sliding back door and stepped in.

I stepped backward, holding my little useless stick in my fist.

"Don't be scared, Shiori-chan," Yoshino said. "It's just us."

I shook my head. "Stay away!"

Her expression kind of sunk. "I'm sorry we scared you, baby. We didn't mean to."

"Well, only a little," Shikaku corrected, slumping against the wall in a way that was no doubt meant to be unthreatening.

She shot him a glare. "We really weren't trying to scare you like _that_ , Shiori-chan. We just wanted to test your chakra-sensing ability. I promise. I noticed the signs the other day, and a surprise test like this is standard procedure for any unconfirmed sensors." She paused, reading my expression. "You can tell it's us, right? We only had our chakra masked, pulled in, before."

It _did_ feel like them. But it _hadn't_ felt like them, only a minute ago. Was that the weird space-suit-muffling sensation I'd gotten from them? "Pull it in again," I ordered. "Hide your chakra again."

Yoshino hesitated, but Shikaku did as I asked, and she followed suit. Their chakra seemed to shrink, almost, like they were folding it into themselves, hiding it away. Or like, most of the time, it was wafting off of them like a smell, and they'd just covered themselves in plastic wrap.

I relaxed a bit. Yes, that felt the same as the muffled signatures from earlier. And now that I concentrated, I could tell who they were, even past the chakra hiding technique. I needed to learn how to mask my own chakra signature like that. It would be useful for stealth missions.

Then, I started to cry. It seemed any strong emotion ended in tears with my tiny body, which I hated.

Yoshino reached down to hug me, and I resisted the urge to kick her in the shin. Because she had a terrible temper. Instead, I kicked Shikaku.

He hopped around on one leg, holding his shin and cursing, which made a giggle slip past my tears. I knew he'd _allowed_ me to kick him, but it was still funny. And a little bit of revenge felt good.

They both relaxed when they heard my laughter, and I knew they thought the incident would be forgotten, washed away by new experiences. But I wasn't who they thought. And though I wouldn't hold a grudge, I also wouldn't forget. What type of society thought it was okay to terrify a child like that? I sighed. The type that also sent children into war, to kill and die for the village. The type I lived in.

Yoshino spent some time asking about my sensing ability, what I'd felt when they'd snuck up on me earlier, and doing little tests till I was exhausted.

I heard them talking as I fell asleep, Yoshino excited about me being a "natural chakra sensor," and Shikaku saying, "And battle instincts. Did you notice how she was holding the stick? She called, 'fire,' instead of 'help.' And…she called your name, Yoshino. Not 'Oba-chan.'"

I had nightmares about my brother, all alone now.

* * *

5/1/16: Tell me what you think, down below. I love to hear from you guys! Any thoughts on upcoming, pre-Academy story points? I've got some ideas but I want to know if there's anything you'd like to see.


	5. Year 2

Shortly after I turned two, I decided it was time to proceed with my training. I waited till Yoshino had left with Shikamaru to one of her friends' house, affecting a headache so that I was allowed to stay home and "sleep."

Of course, instead of doing so, I dressed and slipped out of the house. An old, empty shinobi pack hung over my shoulders, so big on me that it almost touched the backs of my calves with every step I took. I had no way to hide from the eyes of those on the streets, so I simply walked unhurriedly, not looking about in curiosity or uncertainty. I hoped if I looked assured enough, people would assume I had reason to be, and leave me alone despite my young age.

Almost instinctively, I looked to the side with a grin, expecting to find someone sneaking along with me. But I was alone. Of course I was alone. It had been two years already, but lately, without the immediate threat of the Kyuubi, Danzo, and acclimating to a new household, I found myself with the mental freedom to think back. I've always been quick to put the past, and unpleasant but unavoidable things behind me. I don't like to dwell on the negative. But I couldn't stop, and this time, it felt wrong to make myself. Because the memories, while painful, were the last I would ever have with my brother. However, I was on a mission. Not the time to be getting nostalgic—I needed to concentrate.

The library wasn't exactly close, so I hurried as fast as I could without being conspicuous, because I wanted to be sure and return to the house before Yoshino did. When I arrived, I circled around to the side of the building, which had a walking path with a few benches. Luckily, few people ever used the area, and it was deserted.

My chakra sense didn't tell me anything, but that wasn't surprising. Its range was pitiful, really. If I could sense someone with my chakra, they would be close enough that I could see them. It only really came in useful if I needed to sense someone through the walls. Yoshino had been working with me to expand it, but to my immense frustration, we'd had no success. I wasn't used to being bad at things. But though with practice my sensing got more…detailed, I couldn't extend the reach very far at all.

Yoshino wasn't a sensor herself, so everything she was teaching me was from books and advice she got from other people. I appreciated the work she was putting in to developing my skill, but I thought maybe if I could be taught by someone who had personal experience, I could get past my block.

As I'd planned out, I climbed up on one of the benches against the side of the building, which was below a high window. I climbed onto the top of the back of the bench and reached upward toward the bottom of the window, but couldn't reach.

I settled back down, and nodded to myself. I'd expected that. So I took a deep breath, slid off my shoes, and reached for my chakra, directing it toward my feet. Carefully using the amount of chakra I'd practiced with previously, I planted one foot on the wall, and then the other, and started to walk up it. I could feel the drain on my reserves after only a few steps, but it didn't take me long to reach the windowsill.

I clamped the fingers of my left hand around its edge, and placed my right foot on the opposite side, holding myself in place with strength instead of chakra. I didn't move for the span of a few deep breaths, trying to recover my stamina. Then I dug my fingers into the bottom of the windowpane, and gave an experimental tug. It didn't move, and since I could see the lock on the inside, it didn't take a genius to figure out why.

My stomach seemed to get heavier as I exhaled in disappointment. I'd hoped, since the windows were well above the average adult head height, that they wouldn't be locked. But this was a shinobi village. Of course they were locked.

No matter. I'd planned for this, too. I held my right hand aloft, forefinger dangling down, and channeled chakra to the tip, letting it drip out like syrup. With my concentration desperately clamped on the extremely rudimentary chakra thread, I touched my forefinger to the glass and pushed the chakra through, attaching it to the tip of the simple lever-lock inside.

I exhaled shakily, and pulled on the chakra thread. It almost broke, and I clawed through my mind for a bit more mental willpower, and kept pulling. Finally, the lever-lock snapped upward, no doubt a bit stiff from years of disuse. I let the chakra thread go and leaned my forehead against the glass to just breath for a bit.

When I pulled away, I saw the glass was damp with sweat. I wasn't quite ready, but I couldn't keep clinging to the outside of the window. Someone, either inside the library or out, would notice me. So I slid the window upward as slowly as possible so that it wouldn't make noise, and then slipped inside, hanging by my fingertips.

Instead of walking back down the wall, I just pushed away gently and let go. When I hit the wooden floor, I bent my legs to absorb some of the impact, but still fell to my hands and knees with a light thud.

Hopefully, no one would notice. I was in a little-used section of the library, especially at this time of day, and hidden behind the stacks filled with books and scrolls. I'd planned the best I could, but being forced to rely so much on luck grated on my nerves. Hopefully, this outing, if it went skillfully, would mean I could bring enough skill to the table that I wouldn't be forced to rely on luck any longer.

I scuttled across the floor, peeking around corners and dashing between the stacks toward the section I needed. When I arrived, I hurriedly swung the empty pack off my shoulders and read over titles. The civilian library didn't have anything dangerous, or even much that would be useful to a shinobi. But it did carry a small selection of scrolls and books geared toward academy-level, hopeful ninja. Most of them were outdated, dust-covered, and flimsy with age, but that didn't matter to me.

I doubted the basics would have changed much in recent years, and if the books were this dusty, hopefully no one would notice their absence. I grabbed as many texts as I could fit in the pack, selecting based on a combination of weight and my guesses at their level of usefulness.

I didn't stay a second longer than I needed to, slinging the now much heavier pack back across my shoulders and returning to the window. My heart was beating fast with adrenaline, and I looked around quickly before guiding chakra to my feet again, and walking up the wall. I leaned forward, so that the weight of the pack wasn't dragging at me so much, but even so it was exhausting.

I was halfway up and wondering if I would be able to make it to the window when I heard steps coming from the other side of the stack nearest me.

I scrambled up a few more steps, then threw myself upward, grabbing onto the bottom of the sill with my hands. I silently thanked whatever being was listening for the existence of chakra in this world, because normal toddler muscles in my old world would never have been strong enough to do a pull-up with a full backpack on.

I slipped through the window and closed it behind me, just as the library attendant turned the corner. I lowered myself to hang off the edge of the sill again, barely peeking my head over the edge to watch her.

She looked around in confusion, then muttered something to herself and turned back the way she'd come.

My sigh of relief loosened my muscles as well as my lungs, and I fell back to the bench, landing painfully with my back "cushioned" by the pack. I sat up as quickly as I could past the pain, looking around for witnesses as I tried to force air back into my lungs.

No one. At least no one that I could see. My sensing abilities didn't reach very far beyond my body, so they, once again, weren't any help in this situation. But I thought I was probably safe, as there was no reason I'd have ANBU or the like tailing me while disguising their presence.

I struggled back to my feet, slipped on my discarded shoes, and went back home, trying not to bring attention to myself, the way my legs trembled with every step, or how dizzy I was.

I unpacked quickly, sliding the scrolls and books I'd taken behind a concealing layer of my own books, which I'd convinced Yoshino-oba to buy for me over the last year. It was the best hiding spot I had, because a toddler has no privacy, and hiding stolen scrolls under my bedding or in my dresser, both which Yoshino messed with frequently when she washed my things for me, was not a good idea.

I returned the old pack to where I'd found it, and then, with my mission complete, passed out on my futon. I was weak and achy for the next two days, and did little more than sleep and eat, though Yoshino-oba thought it was due to sickness, rather than the physical and chakra exhaustion it was.

* * *

When I felt better, and Yoshino-oba was no longer hovering over me because I was "sick," I retrieved the stolen texts from behind my own books and examined my haul.

A feeling of glee grew in my chest, forcing my mouth in to a wide smile as I read the titles again. A book titled, "Simple Chakra Theory," a small scroll labeled, "Konoha Academy Rudimentary Taijutsu Stances," along with its companion, "Common Mistakes when Learning Taijutsu," a scroll, "Flora and Fauna for Young Kunoichi," "Chakra Control Exercises—Build a Foundation for Excellence," "Genjutsu Theory for Beginners," "Low-Cost Ninjutsu for Kids," and a few others.

I grabbed one of the stuffed animals people assumed I liked, pulled back a flap of fabric near the bottom, and stuck my hand up its butt, grabbing the old kunai I'd found near the Nara clan forest and hidden in its stuffing. It was still sharp, and I used it to carefully cut the small red seal off of each of the stolen texts, without damaging them or the seal. The seal was the library's way of keeping people from stealing the books, and I didn't want to find out if they had some way of knowing if it was destroyed.

Red meant you had to have Academy level access, and if you didn't, you couldn't check out the book. If you tried to take it anyway, "cleverly" hidden away under your shirt or something, the seal would react with the set around the doors, and set off an alarm.

The only problem was, just like libraries in my old world, the sensors to sound the alarm were only placed around conventional doorways. This might have been a larger problem, if the civilian library had anything worth stealing in it. As it was, no enemy shinobi would bother with it, so they had no need to trap the windows as well.

I'd learned that, and many other things about the library, on my trips there with Yoshino-oba. I'd treated every one of them like a little reconnaissance mission, learning everything I could about the place, and planning my infiltration.

I'd measured the distance to the window with my eyes, and when I judged my chakra strong enough, begun to practice "tree" walking, though really I started off on my bedroom wall, right above a thickly padded futon in case I fell, which I did. It took me a long time to work up to the amount of steps I had taken to scale the wall twice.

I'd noticed the locks on the windows, which had stumped me for a while, until I realized that chakra could pass through matter, with the right kind of focus. Then I began to work on chakra strings.

I hadn't anticipated the extra strain of the books on my back when walking up the wall, though, which had almost been my downfall. I resolved to plan for hiccups like that in the future.

I finished cutting off the last of the red seals, examined them thoroughly, trying to burn their form in my mind, in case the design might ever be useful to know in my future studies of fuinjutsu, and put the books and scrolls back in their hiding spot. I took the removed seals with me when I accompanied Yoshino-oba to the market that afternoon.

I dropped them off to the side of a busy vegetable stand with a silent apology to the owner. I didn't think they did, but if the library had any way of tracking them, he might get caught up in my scheme. Either way, though, they wouldn't be traced back to me.

After we got back that afternoon, I spent some time playing with Shikamaru outside. He was smart. I mean, really smart. He probably would have gotten more attention for being a genius if I hadn't been there. But…I watched him carefully lean sticks together to form a house, concentrating with his already characteristic pseudo-scowl. He glanced over at my own little stick house and scowled harder, muttered, "Twoublesome," then returned to his own work. He didn't quite have the "r" sound down yet.

Maybe if it didn't come as easy for him to surpass all the other kids this time around, he'd be a little less lazy. And a little more prepared to face the horrors that were coming. That thought prompted another. I was training myself so I could protect those I cared for. But wouldn't it be even better if I could make them stronger, too? The rookies in the story had all been so woefully unprepared. It was somewhat criminal, really, how low Academy standards were in canon, to allow kids to graduate without the preparation they really needed to survive in the shinobi world.

Didn't shinobi parents notice? Wouldn't they train their kids, try and prepare them for the real world? I mean, I understand wanting your child to _have_ a childhood not eaten up by constant training and war-preparation, but I'd much rather have a child who lived past twenty. Was I missing something? Or maybe, shinobi were just exhausted by war, and lulled into burned out complacency by the years of relative peace.

I was extremely excited to dig further into the books I'd stolen, but I went to bed that night instead, and woke early in the morning to read them. That way had less chance of discovery, as both of my guardians would still be asleep. I woke earlier than everyone else in the house without even trying, most days. Of course, I had the benefit of several naps throughout the day.

I took, "Simple Chakra Theory," "Chakra Control Exercises," and, "Low-Cost Ninjutsu for Kids" out from their hiding spot. I think it's obvious which one I wanted to read first, but I opened the cover of "Simple Chakra Theory," instead.

I admit, I was a little disappointed. I already knew that chakra was energy formed from a combination of the spiritual and physical energy of the body. It was a biological process. One thing did stand out to me, which was that chakra could, at any given time, act as energy or matter, shifting through the two forms contextually.

I wasn't a crazy physics buff in my past life, but I wished I was, because I was pretty sure chakra shared that characteristic with light, which on a subatomic level, could act as either a particle or a wave. Maybe if I'd known more about how my old world worked, I could figure out more about this one.

The book concluded it's rudimentary explanation of chakra by saying that no one really understood chakra. I sighed. I could have carried a book or scroll that would have actually been useful in the pack, if I'd known this one wouldn't be.

I opened, "Low-Cost Ninjutsu for Kids," next, hoping it wouldn't be more of the same. To my delight, it was not. It had a parent-section and kid-section for each of its techniques, and advised parents not to let their children learn these techniques on their own. The techniques were disguised on the kids' side as fun, awesome jutsu that would help them in battle with the "enemy" while playing ninja. The adult side explained how these low-cost jutsu were related to later jutsu, and would help the child build their reserves and learn control.

Jackpot! I giggled aloud to myself, then stifled the noise in case it might accidentally wake anyone.

I quickly flipped through the book, hoping to see the Academy Three somewhere. Alas, no luck, but I didn't let it discourage me too much. It had plenty of other things that I could do! The jutsu were all E-rank, which was the lowest possible, but even so they were practical enough to be _useful_. It also had a few fun arts and crafts that were supposed to build shinobi skill, like origami shuriken and kunai.

Per the book's recommendation, I decided to learn all the jutsu in the order presented. It mentioned that the parent should first instruct the child on sensing and directing their own chakra, and suggested using the leaf sticking exercise for that purpose. Luckily, I could skip that part. The first technique was called kakuremino, which was basically a cloak of invisibility jutsu. I suppressed the urge to bust out in evil laughter.

That name might make it sound a little cooler than it actually was. Basically, you'd disguise yourself in your environment, and then the technique would add a little bit of illusion to augment and strengthen your camouflage. It was similar to the henge, the transformation jutsu, which was probably the easiest of the Academy Three techniques, just not as strong. So, at this level of technique, you needed to be prepared ahead of time with supplies, but I wondered if, with practice, I might just be able to dress in nondescript colors, stand really still, and blend into the background.

I read over the entry a couple times, so excited my face hurt from grinning to myself. Then I moved with the book to stand in front of my mirror, which was attached to the wall at my level and big enough for me to see my whole body.

I looked around for a suitable "cloak," and decided that my pillowcase matched my bedspread well enough to work. I stripped it off my pillow and slid it over my arm, then realized I needed my hand free to perform the technique. Shaking my head at my own eagerness, I freed my forearm and carefully formed the seals. Dog, Boar, Ram, Monkey. Then, skin contact with the "cloak." I slid my hands back into the pillowcase, willing it to blend into the fabric of the bedspread behind it, trying to imagine what that would look like.

As soon as I stopped moving the fabric, it just…stopped being noticeable. It was like the half of my brain which was controlling the jutsu could see the pillowcase covering my forearms, and the other half couldn't. I mean, I could kind of still tell where the edges of the pillowcase were, but it wasn't obvious. And the bumps and shadows around the shape of my arms were practically non-existent.

It kind of reminded me of murals I'd seen back in my old world, where someone would draw something that looked realistic and three-dimensional on a surface like a wall, or a street. I remember one that looked like the street was cracking open and revealing steps down into a lava lake. But if you were to keep walking on that street, you wouldn't descend down into pseudo-hell. You'd just keep going straight, stepping on the illusion. This was like that. But opposite.

If you were to touch my hands, you could tell. You might even be able to tell if you looked at the hills where my arms were from the side. If you were a scent, sound, or chakra sensor, you'd know I was there. But looking straight down on the pillowcase disguising my arms, it looked like my forearms ended at the elbows, and I was looking down on an empty bedspread.

My concentration broke, and the illusion ended. It was kind of a dizzying sensation, to see two things at once. But I supposed that made sense. The one controlling the illusion had to know what was really there, or it lost utility.

I considered my chakra reserves, and then tried again. It was draining, especially as the technique had to be focused on constantly to maintain, but I figured I could do it for a few more minutes, at least. I ran out of chakra about the same time Yoshino-oba began to wake up, but I learned a bit about the cloak of invisibility. The better mental image I had of what the illusion should look like, the background without me in it, basically, the better it worked. Adding more chakra helped, too, but was more of bandaid than a fix, because it only enhanced the illusion to a certain degree.

I didn't try to see what would happen if I truly overpowered the technique, because I didn't have enough reserves left by that point. I wondered if it would break the jutsu, like what happened with Naruto and the clone technique, or what happened when you put too much chakra into the leaf floating exercise. But then again, Naruto had been pretty good with the henge, the transformation technique, which was the extended application of this jutsu. In fact, hadn't he invented his own sexy-jutsu?

The book said with practice, the seals could be reduced, or even removed entirely, since it was such a simple technique. I resolved to practice a lot. I replaced the books in their hiding spot, and promised myself I'd look at the chakra control exercises book next, since I had been too busy practicing the cloak technique to open it.

That afternoon, I was playing with Shikamaru in his room. I'd gotten a little ninja town building block set for my birthday, complete with traps and defenses, and little shinobi you could place around the walls and pretend were fighting each other, or trying to take down the town. It was nice enough that even I could be entertained while putting it together, and Shikamaru loved it on first sight. My chakra reserves had mostly replenished themselves, and I decided to try something.

Shikamaru was building the town wall, and I knew he would need the gate next. Surreptitiously, I formed the hand seals for my new technique, and touched the gate-piece, which was lying on the floor right in front of me. It wasn't the right color to really blend into the floor, so I poured extra chakra into the technique, focusing hard on the image of a bare floor instead of the gate-piece.

Poor Shikamaru. He looked around in confusion for a while, then peeked inside the box, and even stood up to make sure he wasn't standing on it. "I can't find it," he said. "The gate."

I stood up and released the technique, then picked up the gate piece. "Oh, I must have been sitting on it. Sorry."

He frowned at that, but nodded and took the piece, fitting it to the wall.

Inside, I was doing the stereotypical creepy laugh, "fu-fu-fu," with my head thrown back and my hand in front of my mouth. It worked! Well, it fooled a toddler. But still!

A technique like this might genuinely be useful in battles and real life, beyond just kids playing ninja, if I could get good enough with it. It would at least build the foundation for true stealth and concealment jutsu.

* * *

5/8/16: Thank you to those of you who've taken the time to review or send me a PM. As always, I love hearing from you. To that end, I've decided to implement a little bribery system I saw used by **The Carnivorous Muffin** that will be fun for both me and you guys. My posting schedule has settled out to about 1 chapter a week, and I'll probably continue to post on Sundays.

But, **when we reach milestone reviews (some multiple of 100, usually), I'll post an extra chapter** -an omake/interlude covering something Shiori doesn't see. Mostly, these will be humorous, and not critical to the plot. You can make requests or give prompts, which I may or may not use.

Even if I get zero reviews, I'll continue to post the regular updates, so this is just for fun.


	6. Year 2, Week 1

The book of chakra control exercises was great. I had opened it the next morning despite my desire to work on the cool kakuremino jutsu and learn how to make things invisible. Surprisingly, it had more information on chakra than the book about chakra theory had, just in the little tidbits of information it threw out when it explained the exercises, their benefits, and tips and tricks to make them easier.

Since I could do the leaf sticking exercise, which was the first one in the book, I moved on to the leaf spinning exercise, the second. Its name was self-explanatory. You put the leaf on your hand, and instead of using chakra to make it stick, you used chakra to spin it around. It was an order of magnitude harder. I exhausted myself shortly, mostly out of mental fatigue rather than chakra depletion.

Compared to the success of the day before, it was a rather crushing defeat. It also made me wonder about the chakra control of the average shinobi. The only exercises I'd ever seen done in canon were the leaf sticking exercise, tree walking, and water walking. Of course, I assumed the rasengan in all its forms counted, but that was much higher-level than a basic chakra exercise, and if you looked at it like that, any jutsu counted as a chakra exercise. Which…I guess any jutsu _did_ count as a chakra exercise.

But really fine control, like the exercises in the book would teach, what about that? The book said control would allow you to conserve chakra on more difficult ninjutsu, aid in concealing your chakra for stealth techniques, and a slew of other things.

"Chakra Control Exercises—Build a Foundation for Excellence," seemed designed to do exactly that. I resolved to master every exercise in the rather thick book.

My secret skill level notebook was filling up, and I added another page of English writing to it, going over what I'd learned in the last couple days, and reassessing my schedule. It seemed I didn't have enough time in the day to learn everything I wanted. But I reminded myself that I was only two, and tried not to stress out so much. Then I remembered the upcoming events of the canon storyline, and failed in my attempt to de-stress.

That week, Oba-chan and Oji-san took Shikamaru and I to our first cherry blossom festival. Oba-chan had taken us shopping a couple days beforehand, and tried to get me a bright pink kimono. I rebelled, and refused to even try it on. Not only was the color garish and way too girly, but you couldn't _move_ in a kimono! That just seemed like a bad idea.

When Oba-chan grew exasperated with my refusal of her choices, she had me pick out what I wanted, instead.

I chose a dark red, plain hakama for the bottoms, split leg style. Basically, that was just a pair of pleated pants, with so much extra pleats and fabric that unless I spread my legs wide it looked like I was wearing a skirt. For the top, a plain black, normal kimono top. I'm not sure if it had a special name.

Oba-chan let out a long sigh and looked toward the heavens when I showed her my choices. "Are you sure?"

I nodded.

She helped me to put it on, muttering about how her dreams of dressing up a little girl were ruined, and it would look like she had two boy children.

I didn't let her dissuade me with guilt, and stuck my tongue out at her with a smile. "But I look cute anyway," I said.

She snorted, but stepped away and looked at me appraisingly. "All the little girls will go crazy for you."

"Troublesome," I muttered. But if the alternative was wearing one of the things she'd tried to dress me in, I guess it was a sacrifice I'd have to make.

My frown of irritation seemed to amuse her, because she tugged on my pouting bottom lip and called me a cutie, then quickly let go to evade the swipe of my arm meant to push hers away.

The day of the festival, she helped me to dress once again, and on my request, pulled my long black hair up into a high, tight ponytail. Despite her mutterings about dressing two sons, and her harsh grip on my hair, she grinned at me when she was done, and told me how cute I looked. "It's almost too bad you're not a boy, Shiori-chan."

I didn't even think much of the statement at the time.

I thought I looked pretty cool, standing in front of the low-hanging mirror in my room. Like some little anime character. It was too bad I didn't have a sword to complete the outfit.

Shikaku-oji stopped me and Shika by the door, solemnly handing us each a small pouch, then patting us on the head. "My kids are doing good," he said to Yoshino, who had moved up behind us. "They deserve a treat."

I shook the pouch, and at the promising clinking from within, eagerly peeked inside. "Money!" It was a mix of strange little coins and more familiar looking bills.

Shika's eyes widened, and he muttered, "I'm wich!" which I found doubly hilarious, since we'd only been given a small amount. And his inability to say the, "r" sound never got old. Still, it was more than either of us had ever had, at least in this lifetime. About five hundred ryo, which would have been fifty dollars.

Yoshino-oba frowned a bit, but I could tell it was just for show. "Well," she sniffed. "I suppose a little reward is warranted. But if I find you've spent all your money on candy, don't expect any sympathy from me if you get a tummy-ache. And don't use it all and then come asking for more."

Shika and I nodded absently, already dreaming of the things we could buy with our riches.

My once-again-new family left together, the four of us joining the crowd. Shikamaru rode atop Shikaku's shoulders, high enough to see over everyone, and so excited there wasn't a hint of his canon-"Naruto" apathy.

I was holding Yoshino-oba's hand and walking on my own, and a little jealous of Shika's high viewpoint. People milled everywhere, civilians and shinobi together, though I did notice the civilians gave a little more personal space to those they knew were shinobi. I could feel the crowd pressing around us. It was a bit disorienting, especially because I didn't seem able to ignore when a strong shinobi was in my blind spot. Luckily, Yoshino-oba just took it as excited nerves from my first time at the sakura-blossom festival.

Stalls lining the roads sold a variety of foods and novelty items, like kid-sized, fake ANBU masks. I had a sudden desire for the fox mask, partly because its slightly evil looking red whisker marks would match my outfit. And partly because it looked cool and would be ironic. But I didn't want to waste my money. I've always been a bit of a money-grubbing Grinch that way.

There were amusement stalls with activities and little challenges. I snorted at the bold-lettered signs that restricted shinobi from playing in various ways. At some stalls, shinobi had to pay extra to be able to play, and by the prices, it was obvious the stall owner assumed a shinobi would win a moderately large prize, and was charging them as if they'd just walked up and bought the prize instead. At others, the maximum size of the prize per round of play was restricted.

Shika wanted to stop and watch a puppet performance made of paper, which a lot of other kids were also crowding around. The origami skills of the prop, background and character artist were quite impressive, but I was restless, and looked around instead. The "exciting tales of Princess Emiko" weren't really geared towards entertaining adults. Which, ahem, I _was_. The competition at another stall caught my eye, and I tugged on Yoshino-oba's hand. "I'm going over there to play," I stated, pointing.

She hesitated, no doubt worried about losing me in the crowd, but I smiled at her, wide and innocent, and scurried off before she could stop me. "I'll be back in a while!" I called out behind me.

I'm pretty sure she called my name, but it was quickly lost in the noise of the crowds, and I didn't turn back. The stall that had caught my interest was a turtle scooping stall. I stood to the side and watched as adults and children alike leaned over a broad, table-like tub of shallow water. Within the water, little turtles darted about, evading the looming paper scoops people were using to capture them. Whatever people captured, they were allowed to keep, or trade back to the stall keeper for small prizes.

I inched closer, inspecting the turtles. I was no turtle expert, but these seemed like something native to this world. Their shell was smaller, and the little orange legs extending from it were longer than a standard turtle. They darted around at distinctly non-lethargic speeds, and…I'm pretty sure one in the corner was attacking the paper scoop a child was attempting to capture it with. The scoop tore, and the turtle escaped.

I grinned.

"Would you like to play, little one?" someone asked.

I looked up in surprise, to the stall keeper, who was leaning over me with an encouraging smile. I nodded silently.

"Are your parents around? It's only twenty ryo for a scooper," he said, looking for the potential source of money.

I nodded and waved vaguely at their position in front of the origami puppet show, but dug out the money pouch from where I'd tucked it inside my clothes. I carefully pulled out two ten ryo coins and handed them over before tucking away my money again.

He handed me a little bowl and a paper scooper, the sturdiest version he had, since I was obviously only a toddler, and he didn't have to worry about shinobi antics from me.

Hopefully, I'd be proving him wrong. I stepped up to stand beside the pool, watching the turtles' movements carefully, noting the ways they moved when threatened with capture. They were…strange. In fact, if I was judging only by their movements, I wouldn't have dubbed them turtles at all. Too fast, agile, and vicious. I wondered if that would carry over to their movements _out_ of the water.

The stall keeper had given me the sturdiest form of paper paddle, because I was two. And I looked like it. That was good for me, because despite my "training," I didn't think I'd be able to catch anything with the ultra-fragile paddle scoopers he was giving to anyone with a hitai-ate. Even so, the ninja didn't fail to catch their prey.

I watched them move, and realize the trick. So I selected my target turtle, and slid my paddle into the water behind it in one smooth, sideways motion. The turtle darted away as soon as it noticed me, but I was expecting that, and already moving to intercept it from underneath. I brought the paddle up, and basically tossed the tiny turtle into my cup, not giving it time to scramble away.

My paddle hadn't broken, so I took the opportunity to scoop up another two turtles. They scrambled over each other inside the cup, snapping nastily at each other in their panic.

The stall keeper saw my now water-logged and broken scooper, his expression already turning to one of sympathy. "Want to try again?" he asked. He hadn't been paying attention to me, too busy watching the shinobi on the other side of the shallow pool.

I couldn't quite contain my mean smile as I shook my head and showed him my haul.

His expression curdled. "Shinobi kid?" He didn't wait for a response. "Do you want the turtles, or would you like to exchange them for a prize?"

"Can I exchange two of them, and keep the third?"

"Sure. What do you want?" He gestured to the prizes lined up on the other table.

I picked out some sparklers, which looked like long incense sticks. I was judging by sight, hoping they were the same things I'd played with as a kid in my old world. I pulled out the turtles I'd grabbed last and dumped them back with the others, then filled the cup with water so my remaining turtle could swim. Of the three I'd caught, it was the coolest—faster, and more cunning at evading capture than its comrades.

The shop keeper retrieved my sparklers, muttering to himself about "damn sneaky shinobi, training their kids from birth." He handed them to me. "Chakra to the tip will light them. Or a flame, if your parents _can't_ use chakra."

I stepped away, scanning the crowd. I had the urge to practice my stealth training, blending into the background, out of the crowd's notice. But that would be stupid. I wasn't good enough to fool a real shinobi, and a toddler practicing stealth exercises might draw notice, and speculation, if a shinobi happened to be watching. I was considering going back to the origami puppet show when I caught sight of a group walking along the street with plenty of space to spare.

The civilians moved out of the group's way hurriedly, giving them space, and sometimes staring in curiosity. Even the shinobi deferred to their slow progression.

Hyuuga.

Now, the Hyuuga may have been a little purposefully isolated from the rest of the population, and as a clan hold a high position in the village, but it's not like people would normally have such a strong reaction. However, I was pretty sure that was the clan leader and his brother leading the small procession, followed by a few more high ranking clan members. The way they walked so slowly, never moving their gaze from straight in front of them, the fancy clothes and haughty stances…it made an impression. As it was meant to, no doubt.

Standing next to and slightly behind his father, holding himself with as much proper stoicism as a tiny child could, was Neji. He looked like any other tiny Hyuuga, but who else could he be? Hinata wasn't there. Probably deemed too young to go out.

A low-key rush of excitement filled me. Canon characters. I watched the group walk by for a minute, thinking quickly. Then I tucked the sparklers inside the breast of my kimono top-thing, and walked briskly to catch up with them.

I maneuvered up to the front of the group, and caught the eye of Hiashi.

He slowed, and I turned more fully toward him, forcing him to stop. Before he could do anything else, I bowed deeply. I wasn't sure if I was doing it quite right, as I hadn't practiced or had instruction in Japanese formalities from Yoshino-oba yet, but one of the picture books I'd taken from the library had been on formal etiquette for kids, with instructional illustrations. I almost spilled some of the water out of my turtle cup, but self-corrected just in time.

Technically, it wasn't proper for me to introduce _myself_ , but hopefully he'd make allowances, as I was only two. "Nice to meet you. My name is Nara Shiori," I enunciated carefully. It wouldn't do to trip over my still-clumsy tongue in my new language.

He bowed back to me, though much shallower. "Hyuuga Hiashi."

I turned to his brother Hizashi, and he introduced himself as well. Finally, I turned to Neji, who was standing beside his father, and the real reason for my introduction. He was surprised, but managed to catch himself and conclude the social interaction properly.

"May I walk with you?" I asked him.

He nodded silently, obviously still thrown off balance, and I moved to walk by his side.

"You are out without your parents, Shiori-kun?" Hizashi asked. He was a bit stiff, but I noticed a small quirk of smile at the corners of his mouth. Different from his brother, who stared straight ahead and didn't acknowledge either of us or our conversation.

"They are with my younger brother," I said, not bothering to explain that I was an orphan, and they weren't really my parents. "But I'm sure they would feel confident leaving me in the care of the Hyuuga."

His eyebrow rose at that, but he only nodded silently. What was he supposed to say? "No, they probably wouldn't?"

Neji was eyeing me from the side, obviously pretending not to. We weren't walking for very long till we reached a little copse of sakura trees. The group stopped, and I waved Neji away from them a little ways so we could talk.

"Is this your first festival?" I asked him.

He nodded. "Yes. Father said I'm mature enough to come with him today," he revealed with little facial expression, but obvious pride. I recognized a mirror of my own earlier painstaking enunciation in him.

"It's my first festival, too. I played at one of the challenge stalls, and won these." I pulled the sparklers out of my top and showed him. Honestly, I wasn't quite sure how to go about making friends with little kids. But…sparklers were always cool, right? Especially if you hadn't played with them before. "You're not scared of fire, right?"

"Of course not!" His little indignant frown was pretty cute.

"Good. Will you hold this for me?" I thrust the cup holding my turtle at him, and he took it with fascination, watching the little angry creature inside dart about.

"The stall owner said you could start them with chakra," I muttered, tearing open the packaging and taking a sparkler stick out. It only took a little concentration to guide chakra to my fingertip, which I placed on the tip of the sparkler. Sure enough, it smoked a little bit, and began to burn with a sputter, throwing off sparks like a mini firework. I startled and jerked my finger away, but tried to play it off as if I was cooler than I was. Nope, I didn't just jump like a little kid. Not _me_.

Neji stared at the sparkler. "You can use chakra?"

"Of course," I said like it was nothing, though I knew it was surprising for a two year old. But Neji was a prodigy in his own right, and I wanted to make sure he knew from the beginning that I wasn't inferior to him. I waved the sparkler around quickly, and we watched as it left light-trails behind it. After a moment, I asked casually, "Do you want a sparkler? I've got plenty."

He nodded quickly, and when I lit one and handed it to him, he said, "I thank you for the gift, Nara-san."

"You can call me Shiori, Neji-kun." I grinned boldly, bulldozing past any possible objections.

We played with the sparklers till I ran out, and I had to admit, their light was beautiful against the backdrop of the falling sakura blossoms. But I figured Yoshino-oba and Shikaku-oji would be looking for me. When I took the turtle back, Neji couldn't quite conceal the sad expression on his face, so I walked back over to his father.

"Hizashi-sama, I would like to present Neji-san with the gift of this turtle, with your permission," I said. I would have just given it straight to Neji, but I wasn't sure if they'd let him keep it or not. And I wanted to make an impression of myself on the more influential members of the Hyuuga clan. Being a powerless toddler was bad enough. Being an _unknown_ powerless toddler would make things even harder.

"Turtle…?" He looked between the surprised Neji and myself, and then nodded solemnly, though I noticed the twitching hints of a smile again. "That would be acceptable. Neji, please accept this gift properly."

Neji hurried over, then bowed and said his thanks as he took the turtle cup. His eyes were a bit too wide for stoicism, and he kept glancing between me and his new turtle.

"I will see you later, Neji-kun!" With one last bow, I ran off to find my family. With Shikamaru, and now Neji, I'd met, and hopefully gained the first bits of influence over, two of the future canon major players.

* * *

5/18/16: I'm a couple days late with this chapter. Insomnia is the enemy of creativity, for me. I'm going to try and post an extra chapter before the standard one on Sunday to make up for my lateness. As always, please let me know what you thought in the comment box down below-I love to hear from you guys.


	7. Year 2, Week 3

"Where have you been?" Yoshino-oba demanded.

I suppressed a wince as her voice grated in my ears. "Err…I was with Neji-kun and his family?" No, don't make it a question. Confidence, even nonchalance, was key to dealing with Yoshino. I'd noticed Shikaku calm her down with that tactic more than enough times. "His dad and uncle were nice. I gave Neji my turtle." I frowned in slight irritation at her and slouched a little for good measure.

"Neji? I don't know any Neji! An _hour_! We were looking for you—" She took a deep breath to continue on, when Shikaku interrupted her.

"Hyuuga."

"What?" she snapped.

"Neji Hyuuga. Son of Hizashi. Branch group," he drawled.

Yoshino was slightly derailed by this, and I took the opportunity to add, "Neji's nice. We're friends now. Can he come over to play?"

Shikaku's eyebrow raised just a little at that. "The Hyuuga were _nice_ to you. And you gave him…a turtle."

I nodded, refusing to react. "Yes."

Yoshino's eyes traveled between her husband and me, and then over my shoulder. I took a quick look to see what she was staring at, and saw the Hyuuga procession behind me. I waved to Neji, and he bowed back, holding the turtle cup carefully between both of his hands. His father Hizashi nodded to me, while Hiashi looked toward me, then away again, as if his eyes had never strayed from straight in front of him in the first place.

I heard a strange sound behind me, and turned back around. It took me a moment to realize it was a giggle. When my eyes met Yoshino's, she lost the battle to restrain herself, and burst out in sputtering, strangled laughter. "Oh, I can only imagine, that Hiashi, with his 'I-see-everything' attitude. A turtle! The look on his face!" She burst out laughing again till she started to sag, and Shikaku wrapped his arm around her shoulder to support her.

He looked at me very deliberately then, and winked. "We'll invite Neji to dinner sometime, how about that?"

I smiled back before the decision to do so entered my brain, and only belatedly realized that he wasn't fooled by my childish act. I could only hope his knowledge and suspicion didn't run deeper than the surface level, because I apparently wasn't doing a great job with my toddler impersonation.

* * *

A week later, Shikamaru was still raving about the origami puppet show. I'd heard the plot re-enacted by him, several times. He actually explained everything to me pretty well for an eighteen month-old kid, enough so that I could have told the story myself without help.

"And then," he took a breath from the non-stop talking, "then Pwincess Emiko escaped, and bad-old-guy was weally surprised, cause Pwincess Emiko was secwetly a shinobi, and—"

"Shika," I interrupted. "Princess Emiko used shuriken, right?" Had Shikamaru ever been this openly passionate about something in the canon story? I didn't think he had. But maybe, it had just been off-screen. Or maybe he'd out grown it, already too used to emulating his dad's aggressive nonchalance by the time the story started.

He nodded seriously. "Uh-huh. And she was weally good at thwowing them. She went like," here, he emulated her movements, dramatically throwing a hand out, and shooting invisible shuriken into the wall with a verbal sound effect, " _thwip_ , and bad-old-guy was stuck to the wall by his _clothes_!" He widened his eyes at me so I'd understand just how extremely cool this was.

I nodded seriously. "That _is_ really cool. You know," I leaned in and lowered my voice for effect. "I know a super-secret technique to make weapons like Princess Emiko had," I said.

He leaned in, too, caught up by my attitude, and looked around for eavesdroppers before whispering back, "Weally? Can you stick people to the wall by theiw clothes, too?"

I coughed. "Well, err, not yet. That takes a lot of practice. But, if you want, I can show you my super-secret technique to make shuriken like Princess Emiko has. It's a big responsibility, though. If you learn it, you have to practice a lot till you're good at it, because I can't teach it to someone who's too lazy to put the knowledge to good use. It'll be troublesome…" I leaned away with a sigh, and shook my head.

"No, no!" He grabbed my forearm. "I can do it! I pwomise, if you teach me, I'll pwactice a lot!"

I eyed him speculatively. "Hmm…"

"Pwease, Shiowi!" He shook my arm a little, making puppy dog eyes up at me.

I held back a laugh. "Okay, I'll show you. Come with me." We ran back inside the house, and I took a few pieces of paper out of the stack I practiced on when Yoshino-oba guided my writing and calligraphy practice. We went to Shikamaru's room, sneaking past Yoshino in the kitchen with some suppressed giggling on Shikamaru's part.

"Okay, watch this," I said, taking two pieces of paper and folding them, as the instructions in my stolen jutsu for kids book had shown. I'd thought at first that it was a bit silly, but I'd still almost accidentally memorized the folding sequence. I didn't have any scissors, so I used a trick I'd learned as a kid in my old world, and folded the paper back and forth, creasing it down hard both ways with a thumbnail, and then licking along the fold. The creasing and my spit weakened the paper along that line, and it split straight without the need for any sharp objects.

Shikamaru watched intently as I painstakingly created a little origami, four-pointed shuriken.

I held up the completed product. "Super secret ninja art, paper shuriken!" I announced dramatically, and threw it at the wall, where it bounced off harmlessly.

He hurried to pick it up, examining the craft in wonder. "It's just like Pwincess Emiko's!"

"Your turn to make one," I said with a grin. "I'll walk you through it."

He shot over to me and dropped to the floor immediately, grabbing two sheets of his own.

We made quite a few until Shikamaru got the hang of it. He didn't have quite the motor skills I did, and he looked morosely down at the puffy, lopsided thing that was his first attempt. "Twoublesome." But that didn't deter him, and with practice his folds were straight and precise, the resulting shuriken tight and aerodynamic.

The jutsu book had illustrated instructions on shuriken throwing form, which I demonstrated for Shikamaru. Though I was sure a real shinobi would find plenty of errors in our form, I thought we were pretty damn good for toddlers. The only problem was the tips of the paper shuriken bent pretty easily when they hit the wall. But I had an idea for that.

"Okay, Shika," I said. "Now, it's time to increase the battle potential of our shuriken through a super-secret ninja recipe. We're going to have to go on a supply gathering mission to the kitchen."

By this time, he had complete faith in my skill and knowledge, so he nodded seriously.

We stuffed our pockets with shuriken, then snuck out, peeking our heads around the corner to make sure no one saw us. Yoshino-oba was no longer in the kitchen, so I grabbed a small bowl and had Shika stand on a chair to reach the sink where he filled it halfway with water, while I grabbed another bowl and put some flour in it.

We took the bowls outside, grabbing some white craft glue on the way, and headed out onto the wrap-around porch behind the house. I then showed off my super-secret ninja recipe, paper-mache paste. We covered the shuriken in the paste, and then laid them out on the edge of the porch to dry.

By that time, we were both exhausted, but we cleaned up the bowls as sneakily as possible before we napped. When we woke up later that afternoon, we ate, and then headed out to check on the progress of our shuriken. They were dry, and when we pulled them up off the porch, I was pleased to see they were quite hard as well. A bit of water washed off the edge of the porch, and erased the evidence of our little crafting session.

Then we practiced throwing them at trees. Unsurprisingly, accurately aiming a shuriken was quite difficult, even more so for Shikamaru than me, but we had a lot of fun with it.

"I hit it, I hit it!" he shouted, then started giggling while bouncing up and down with an over abundance of pride, and pointing at the tree trunk he'd just successfully bounced a shuriken off. He quickly stopped and wiped away the smile, as if realizing how exuberant he'd been, and looked around as if people would be watching and mocking him.

I smiled, as if I didn't notice. "Good job, Shika!" He really was quite impressive. That was the Nara genes for you. An eighteen month-old successfully hitting the target after less than a day of practice. Of course, the target was the side of a large tree, and only a few meters away. But even so.

As I practiced the leaf-spinning exercise that night, I did the creepy fu-fu-fu laugh in my head. Game-i-fying training was the way to go. Shikamaru and I were going to be badasses.

* * *

It took me a couple weeks to master the leaf-spinning exercise, which by my standards meant being able to do it almost without thought. Spinning a leaf might seem simple. And it was. But it's a lot harder than you might think to get chakra to form itself and then move in any complex way.

Basically, to get something to spin, you need to exert force around an axis. In this case, the middle of the leaf suited my purpose. So, push on the edge, and it will spin, right?

My first attempts revealed the problem with this simplistic idea. Yes, the leaf spun. Well, it would be more accurate to say that it tumbled off my hand, moved by the force of my chakra pushing at it. I lessened the amount of chakra, and tried again. The leaf didn't go sliding away that time, but if you can imagine placing a leaf on a table, and then touching your fingertip to the table and pushing into the edge of the leaf till it spun…well that's exactly what I was doing, but with chakra. It still wasn't stable.

So I concentrated a bit harder, and pushed from both sides of the leaf at the same time, doing my best to use equal force. It worked. The leaf spun faster, and was mostly stable, though only for a couple seconds. I spent the next few days of chakra exercises trying to extend the time and fully stabilize the leaf before I realized that it wasn't working, and returned to the drawing board.

Just pushing from both directions lasted for a few seconds, but just like spinning a leaf on the table with both hands, I couldn't keep it up, because my metaphorical hands and arms could only twist around each other so many times before I ran out of flexibility, and had to release and start over. It worked, but I didn't want it to just work. I wanted mastery.

So I started over, approaching the problem from a new direction. The problem with visualizing myself spinning the leaf with opposing pushes was that I only had two arms, and they only spun so far before I had to reset. Now, my chakra wasn't actually forming arms and pushing or anything like that. But I was limiting myself mentally, all the same. Chakra was not confined to the capabilities of my body. That was the whole point! In canon, puppet-masters did things with chakra strings that a normal human would never have been able to do, and multitasked beyond the realm of what could be done with brainpower.

I wasn't trying to control a humanoid body with preciseness that bordered on realism. I was only trying to spin a damn leaf. I attempted to divorce my thought pattern from my physical body. What was the best way to spin a leaf, that gave speed, stamina, and optimal control? A machine would do it best, probably.

I grinned, letting out a breath of surprise. That was the answer.

I imagined carefully before directing my chakra this time. A disk of chakra attached to the middle of the leaf. The circle would spin like a bike wheel, or a windmill, the motor running it charged on willpower and intent. And, of course, chakra. It was quite a bit more abstract than what I'd been attempting previously, because I didn't want to have to imagine each one of the component gears, and shafts. I just wanted it to work as if I had. The first couple tries, I couldn't quite get the disk to do more than twitch.

Then, I relaxed, let go of my frustration, and reassured myself that it would work, because I wouldn't allow failure. That time, there was no resistance. The disk spun, and with it, so did the leaf. It kept spinning, long past the point it would have stopped only an hour previous. I forced it faster and faster till it was barely brushing my palm, almost flying away from its own speed. When I finally stopped, I saw that the circle where the little chakra disk had been attached was darker than the rest of the leaf, a little pulped from the force exerted on it.

I would fix that. I grinned to myself and got to work, tweaking and practicing for the next couple weeks, till I could spin the leaf at blurring speed immediately from a dead stop, and reverse the direction of spin just as quickly.

And in the meantime, I experimented with the cloak of invisibility jutsu. I tried overpowering the jutsu, but the extra chakra only made the illusion a _bit_ more believable. The return on chakra investment wasn't worth it. What really made the difference was a rock-solid idea in your head of what people _should_ see when the jutsu was in effect.

And I soon realized that the jutsu had a much wider range of application than what the book suggested. Because I didn't only have to imagine the illusion being the non-existence of whatever the cloak was hiding. I mean, sure, the jutsu wasn't really made for it, but I could see possibilities.

I was back in my room, using the pillowcase for testing once again. This time, instead of imagining the pillowcase, and my arms beneath it, melding into the background of my futon, I imagined blackness. I'd considered trying the sky, but realized quickly that the idea was a little too difficult to keep in mind. Empty, sucking blackness was easier. I ran the idea around my mind, testing its edges and settling the image. Then I ran through the hand seals clumsily and slid my hands back under the pillowcase, pushing the illusion onto it.

It worked, kinda. The pillowcase turned black. But it wasn't exactly the vision of the dark abyss I'd been trying to create. The jutsu wanted to hide me, pulling imagery from the back and displaying it from the front, disguising me as long as I kept pumping chakra over the fabric. It didn't want to display illusionary windows into the workings of my mind.

I sighed. I'd keep working on it, but I doubted it would ever get much better. I was already pretty damn good with the jutsu as it was intended, and it didn't want to work for this. But it was an idea. A good idea, maybe. I'd just need to learn a different base jutsu.

With a grunt of frustration, I pulled my paper shuriken from their hiding spot in between the pages of the legitimate books hiding my stolen books, and peeked my head into Shikamaru's room. "Want to play ninja?" I asked him.

He'd been lying on the floor in a patch of sunlight from the window like a cat, but at that, one eye popped open. "Now?"

"Yeah. We can have a shuriken battle."

The other eye opened, and he grabbed his own little stash, following me out to the back. Shikamaru did love to laze around like an old, fat cat, but when I suggested a joint activity, my little brother was almost always willing.

Sometimes, it felt weird thinking of him as my brother. I mean, _my_ brother didn't exist here. He was back on Earth-normal, pretty much alone in the world now that I was gone. But still, Shika was my brother too, and I wanted him to be strong.

We moved a few hundred yards around the house, because I didn't really feel like being caught by anyone or noticed by the other clan kids who might be out playing or training—haha, yeah, I know, a Nara training, teehee—and I felt safe enough with Shikamaru as a witness to any possible kidnappings.

Shikamaru and I stood across from each other, underneath the smaller trees that weren't yet part of the Nara forest, and made the seal of confrontation. Then, out came the shuriken, shooting instantly toward each other. We both missed, as the other dodged. I'd gotten passably accurate over the last month, but I was practicing with my left hand instead of my right. Because it seemed like shurikenjutsu should be an ambidextrous skill.

I still pretty much sucked with the left hand, so I had today's battle cut out for me. Shikamaru was… _amazing_ for a toddler. But he couldn't beat me unless I allowed some sort of handicap.

He threw a shuriken and ducked behind a slim tree. Another folded paper throwing star flew out from behind it, and while I was distracted by dodging, he popped out from the other side of the tree and threw two more in quick succession.

I dodged the first, but the second was flying just a little off, right behind it. I tried to do the fancy trick I'd seen in canon, where you blocked a flying shuriken by hitting it with your own, but my left hand wasn't up for it, and my shuriken missed, flying uselessly into the leaves above. Shika's shuriken buried itself in the hair to the left of my face. I stilled, looking at it out of the corner of my eye. "Wow, Shika," I called. "That was awesome." I had not taught him that. Which meant his strategist mind was chugging away already.

I plucked the shuriken out of my long black hair, which I wished I'd tied back instead of leaving it loose. "You almost got me in the eye. A little more practice, and you'll be there!" Typically, encouraging kids to try and hit their siblings in the eyes with faux-weapon projectiles would be considered a bad idea. But I didn't want to train him into the habit of holding back. An instinctive shuriken to the enemy's eye just might save Shika's life one day. I held out his shuriken for him to take back.

He didn't even bother to hold back a huge grin as he walked toward me. "I won!"

"Did you plan that?"

He nodded. "Shiowi is too good. Twoublesome. So I thinked a lot."

" _Thought_ a lot," I corrected absentmindedly.

"Thought a lot," he repeated after me obediently, reaching for his shuriken.

Before he could grab it, I whipped it around to the side of his neck, pressing the paper edges to his skin. I stared challengingly into his wide dark eyes. "Now I win."

"But…that's cheating!"

"Yes. Shinobi lie, Shika. And sometimes they cheat. It doesn't really matter who followed the rules of the game, in real life. It matters who's alive, and who's dead. Remember that." I took the shuriken away from his neck and pressed it into his hand. Then I made the seal of reconciliation, to assure him I wasn't about to attack him again. "I want you to be the one who's alive."

"Impressive," Shikaku's voice called out from behind me. "But I must say, I'm surprised you two are engaged in such a scintillating pastime."

Well, shit.

* * *

5/21/16: This is a bonus chapter for those of you who were waiting for the chapter that never arrived on Sunday. Enjoy! Also, I'm eating up my buffer of already written scenes pretty quickly, which means I've less time between writing and posting to review and make sure things are logical, and the characters are responding as they should. So, review, guys, and help me out! Reading your thoughts often helps to spur my own, and give me ideas to better the upcoming chapter before I post.

I'm excited for Shiori to get a bit older, but she's pushing so hard to do things as soon as possible that I keep realizing there's more that needs to happen before time moves on, and since this story is basically self-indulgence, I'll be writing about all those little things.


	8. Year 2, Week 5

I turned around slowly and looked up at Shikaku, dread settling in my stomach. My heart had jumped as soon as I heard his voice, and the sudden rush of blood to my head was making me feel a little dizzy.

He was standing in a semi-slouch, with his arms crossed over his chest. The bored expression on his face belied any "surprise," about Shika's and my actions. He knew.

I took a deep breath, and released the tension from my limbs, only letting it remain in my ramrod-straight spine and the challenging tilt of my jaw. This was a trick I'd learned in my old life. There's no use trying to hide from the truth. When bad things happen, straighten your back, lift your head, and meet them head on. Whatever came of Shikaku finding out, it was too late for me to stop it completely. I would mitigate the damage as I could, and accept whatever came my way as the consequences of my actions. Not that I felt guilty. Sometimes, good actions have bad consequences, and that shouldn't be a deterrent from doing them.

But it wouldn't do to seem too defiant, I realized. I lowered my chin a little, and tilted my head to the side, though my spine did not unbend. I didn't know what to say, and if I stayed silent much longer, he would speak again and take even _more_ of the upper hand. But I didn't want to start off saying anything that would admit guilt. "Why are you surprised?" I did my best to keep both challenge and fear out of my voice.

Shika inched closer to us awkwardly, looking between his father an me unsurely. I had told him to keep our super-secret ninja training just that, a secret. But he seemed alarmed to realize that maybe it was a secret because we were doing something we weren't supposed to be, and not as a fun game.

Shikaku leaned down and picked up a paper shuriken off the ground, inspecting it curiously. "Did you make this yourself, Shikamaru?"

"Umm…" he looked at me again, then just nodded silently.

"And where did you learn to do that?"

Shika hesitated, and looked to me again. He didn't want to betray me if I was going to get in trouble, but he didn't want to defy his father, it was obvious.

"I taught him," I volunteered.

Shika sighed in relief, and nodded.

Shikaku tossed the shuriken in the air, and caught it without looking. "And who taught you?"

I clenched my jaw, trying to figure out how much he knew. If he knew about the library books, it would be a bad idea to lie about them. But…if he didn't know, it was a huge deal if I revealed them. I decided the trade-off of possible extra punishment for lying _and_ stealing was better than the alternative of _revealing_ previously _unknown_ stealing. "My okaa-chan taught me."

Shikaku seemed to deflate a bit at that, and he nodded silently. "Shikamaru, why don't you go find your mom and get cleaned up for lunch?"

"What about Shiowi?" he said, unwilling to abandon me.

I gave him a small smile. "Oji-san and I are going to talk, I think. I'll be there later. Go ahead."

When we were alone, Shikaku sighed gustily and turned away. "Let's watch the clouds, Shiori." He walked over to a spot with a few larger rocks, and sat on the ground, leaning back against it.

I hesitated, a bit surprised, but joined him on my own, smaller, rock. It's sun-beaten warmth seeped into my back, trying to convince me to relax, but I held my courage steady in my spine. We were across from each other, and his legs were so long that his feet almost touched my own, stretched out.

After a few minutes of silence, during which I only grew more tense, he spoke. "I'm not angry, Shiori. You can relax. I really do just want to talk."

'Well, sorry if that doesn't completely reassure me,' I thought snarkily. But I attempted to put my body language a bit more at ease.

"You've been training," he said calmly, "and not just with the shuriken, I know."

So he knew about the chakra exercises, and the basic E-rank jutsu. _Damn_. Why, why, _why_ had I thought it would be safe to keep those books in my room!? My palms were sweaty, but I didn't say anything.

"You've been training your body. I've noticed you exercising," he finished, and then stared at me expectantly.

Wait, what? My returned stare was blank for a minute, and then relief surged through me. He didn't know about the rest. I nodded slowly, jerkily.

"Why are you training?" he asked.

I stared at him for a second, again. I wasn't sure what direction I'd expected the conversation to go, but this wasn't it. "Umm, to get stronger."

He frowned at that. "I won't accept vague answers, Shiori. I know you're intelligent enough to give coherent, thoughtful responses."

I swallowed, wishing I had something to drink to get rid of the dryness in my mouth. "I'm going to get stronger, so I can protect the people I care about. So that no one else dies." The last was spoken in a small voice, and I looked down to my own feet, which seemed so incredibly tiny when up against his. My mind flashed back to my brother, in that hospital bed for months on end, literally wasting away. I'd been so desperate for a way to save him. And something had granted my wish, and in the process, sent me away to this world. A world with chakra. Which, if we're honest, is magic. A way to accomplish pretty much _anything_ , if you were strong enough, skilled enough. Next time, I wouldn't need to rely on some higher power, that took its own price in exchange for granting my wishes.

"That's a pretty big job for one person," he said casually.

"I'm not deluded!" I frowned at his condescension. "I realize protecting everyone with only my own power will be impossible. I'm not always going to be there, and sometimes the enemy will be more than what I can deal with alone. That's why I'm going to make sure the people I care about are strong, too. I'll teach them to protect themselves." I closed my mouth then, realizing I may have said a bit too much. When my emotions were high, my tongue could run away from me.

He didn't react visibly, his face a calm mask of speculation, as if we were debating about what Yoshino might make for dinner. "You made friends with Neji, on your own initiative. That's not like you, usually. You play with some of the other clan kids if they ask you, sometimes, but never otherwise."

The clan kids were just that, kids. It was hard to spend a lot of time around people so far below my level, even if they were smarter than average. I've never been one of those people that just loves kids. And since they weren't in the canon story, I didn't have that extra push of incentive. Maybe they would be really useful and grow up to be powerful, and just hadn't been part of Kishimoto's story because he didn't have space for a horde of characters. He certainly never even _mentioned_ _tons_ of the shinobi that lived in Konoha. But without the foreknowledge of canon to make them stand out, they seemed unimportant to me.

"I heard people talking," I replied. "They said Neji is a prodigy. I'm a prodigy, too. I heard you and your friends talking about it in the other room one time, and Okaa-chan always said I was. At first I thought the other kids were really stupid, but then I realized it's just because me and Shika are really smart, even though we're little. I wanted to talk to Neji, because I thought he might be like me."

"Oh? And was he?"

"Yeah," I nodded. "That's why I wanted to be friends."

"And what about protecting everyone, all your friends? It would make it easier to do that if they were like you, right? People who could be strong and also protect themselves."

"…Yeah." Damn. I kept underestimating just how _smart_ Shikaku was. I mean, I knew that already, but actually interacting with him, like this? It just smashed his intelligence in my face. He would find out all my secrets if I didn't do a better job of hiding them.

"Why can't you rely on us adults to protect you? That's our job, isn't it?"

Ughh…What was I supposed to say to that!? 'I don't trust you guys to handle what's coming, based on the canon story's portrayal of the future?' Or, 'Shinobi send their pre-teens into battle. Don't pretend you're going to protect us when you know it's not true.' "Sometimes, you won't be there," I settled on. "I'll be alone again." I cleared my throat, and looked away.

We sat in silence again, and when I'd had enough of avoiding him, I looked back.

His eyes were closed, and his head was tilted back to face the sky. "You were alone before?" He asked gently, opening one eye to gauge my reaction.

"My…family…died. I was alone then." I thought back to the hospital bed, and my brother's cold hands, bigger than my own, already manly-looking, but so weak. Separation, and death. The two things were not so different to me, now that I had experience the latter. I swallowed past the lump in my throat, and frowned at Shikaku. Where was he going with this line of questioning?

He sighed, slowly and deeply, seeming to deflate with the loss of breath. Then he began speaking in a low, calm voice. It was the same voice he'd sometimes tell bedtime stories to Shikamaru in, when the boy begged him. "When you were in the shelter, you passed out. Likely from the stress and the force of the Kyuubi's chakra. One of the other children noticed you as they were being removed from the shelter, and picked you up. They kept you with them until they got to the orphanage. You didn't have anything to identify you, and the orphanage workers assumed you were siblings. They were, and are, quite overworked, you know."

I hadn't known this, but why was he telling me now? What did this have to do with anything?

"You didn't wake up right away, so they had a medic examine you. The medic determined you weren't injured, just exhausted. A lot of infants died that day, from the pressure of the Kyuubi's chakra. _You_ got chakra exhaustion. As far as the medic could tell, you instinctively resisted with what little power you had. But you were fine, ultimately, so you didn't go to the hospital, because they needed that space for people who were actually injured."

And, of course, they would have prioritized the care of shinobi above infants who were currently useless to the village's protection.

"We asked for you at the orphanage first, after your parents couldn't be found. They didn't have you listed as a Nara, and you were still asleep, so they told us they didn't have you. We knew you knew your own name. Your parents had you memorize what to say if you ever got lost, do you remember?"

"I'm Nara Shiori, and my okaa-san and otou-san are Ryouta and Yukiko. I live in the Nara clan complex," I recited dutifully. "Of course I remember."

One side of his mouth quirked up at that, in a smile that softened his almost constantly fierce expression. "Okay. So we knew if you weren't injured, you'd be able to tell people who you were and where you lived. So we checked with the hospital. But you'd been asleep, and couldn't tell anyone anything. And, since your father wasn't a Nara, you don't have all the distinctive characteristics that would clue outsiders in to who you are. The hospital said they didn't have you. They were overworked too, or someone might have remembered you, even though you weren't labeled as a Nara."

Or maybe, someone was trying to make me "disappear." Someone like Danzo. But that was just speculation.

"So Yoshino and I started trying to find you in the city. Your parents' bodies still hadn't been found, and your whole street was demolished by the Kyuubi. We really didn't want to believe that you had all been trapped inside when the Kyuubi hit that street. Your parents were shinobi; we knew they must have gotten you out immediately. A chakra sensor searched through the rubble to make sure no one was still alive, trapped. He did find _one_ person, on the edges. The others…" he trailed off for a moment, lost in thought. "But you weren't there. And neither were your parents. All others on the street were assumed dead."

'Squished like little shinobi pancakes,' I thought.

"At that point, a lot of people were still missing, many of whom were never found. The Kyuubi's attacks can burn right through—" he cut off again, and cleared his throat. "Well. So we returned to our first option, and went back to the orphanage, searching through all the kids under one year. We thought maybe someone would have picked you up after that first day and brought you in. And we found you."

"Oh." That's all I could say. I had thought they were just getting their own lives settled after the horror of the Kyuubi attack before picking me up. But it didn't really make that much difference, in the end. What was the point of this story?

He stood up, and reached a hand down to pull me up as well.

I took it, then dusted off the seat of my pants and followed his leisurely stroll back toward the house.

"Shiori, we never meant for you to be left alone in the orphanage. You must have been scared." He reached down, and took my hand again, matching his stride to my own much slower pace. "But I promise, we're not going to leave you alone. You don't have to only depend on yourself. If you need help, you can come to me."

I ran through what had just happened in my mind, trying to figure out what was going on in his head, because that whole conversation had taken a sharp turn I was not expecting. He didn't know about the chakra exercises or the library books. He thought I was keeping my training a secret because I thought the people I loved were going to die, and that he and Yoshino didn't care about me enough to take me away from the orphanage. Well, he wasn't wrong. The people I came to love in this world _would_ die, if I didn't change something. And I had thought he and Yoshino would have taken Shikamaru out of the orphanage right away, if it had been their real kid stuck there, but I hadn't blamed them for not doing the same for me.

Except…now that I learned I'd been wrong, my eyes were burning a little bit. I clenched the fist of my free hand, and took a deep breath, trying to think of something else. Damned toddler body! Crying at every opportunity. I scowled down at the ground, blinking hard.

When we reached the house, Shikaku stopped outside the sliding back door, and squeezed my hand. "Do you believe me? That you can count on us, on me?"

I wasn't sure that I did, and after our talk, I didn't feel right lying to him. He didn't know everything about me, and if he did, would duty to the village come before my own well-being? He would let his own son enter, and then graduate the Academy at twelve. It was the shinobi way, to put the village ahead of themselves and those they cared for. I looked up at him, and said honestly, "We'll see."

He swallowed at that, adam's apple bobbing sharply up and down, but he nodded. "I'll show you, over time." Then he opened the door, and we took off our shoes. "Yoshino!" he called out. "How long till lunch?"

"Thirty minutes!" she called back from the kitchen. "Don't forget to take off your shoes, and don't leave the back door open! Bugs will get in."

I heard little running footsteps, and then Shika peeked his head around the corner. He looked between his father and me, assessing the situation.

I smiled and nodded at him, and he gave me a small relieved smile in return, before Yoshino called him back to the kitchen.

Shikaku obediently closed the door behind us, and then motioned me over to the coffee table in the middle of the room, sitting down himself on the floor next to it. He opened the side drawer of the box that sat on top of it, and withdrew the game pieces within. "Sit down, Shiori. I'm going to teach you how to play shogi."

He spent most of the next thirty minutes explaining the pieces, and how they moved. While we were putting the pieces away to go wash up and eat lunch, he casually asked me, "You remember your parents teaching you the phrase to say if you were lost?"

"Yes," I said, fumbling and dropping a couple pieces because my hands were too small to hold more than a few at a time.

"How far back _do_ you remember?"

"Hmm, a long time, I guess." I put away the pieces in my hands, and returned for the ones I'd dropped.

"Shiori," he said simply.

I looked up, and found his stare trained on me. "…I remember being in Okaa-chan's belly, a little bit. It's kind of blurry. I didn't know things, back then."

We stood, and headed toward the bathroom to wash our hands. "That is a long time," he agreed simply.

* * *

5/22/16: Whew! I wrote this chapter and half of the next one, all today. There was no time to let it percolate and review it a couple times before posting, because it's Sunday already, so please excuse any errors, but let me know if you find them so I can edit it. If you're wondering why last chapter was titled Week 3, and this one is Week 5, even though this one picks up right where that one left off, it's because 2 weeks passed during the course of the previous chapter.

I didn't quite expect the chapter to head in _this_ direction, but if any of you were wondering back in the beginning of the story why Shiori was at the orphanage, this is why.

Next chapter will be an Interlude chapter. It will be more or less the same events as this chapter, with a bit extra before and afterward, but from Shikaku's point of view. A guest reviewer suggested/requested it, and I thought it was a great idea. It will be posted as the normal chapter, not a bonus, since we haven't hit 100 reviews yet.

And finally, to those of you who have PM'd or left me a review that I haven't responded to yet, I will soon. I figured you'd prefer me to write the next chapter first. ;)

As always, please review! I love hearing from you, and thoughtful commentary always sparks new story ideas.


	9. Interlude--Shikaku

It was Shikaku's day off, but he'd gone in to the office in the morning anyway, because he had a bit of paperwork from the night before he'd been a little too lazy to finish before going home. And he wanted to talk to Inoichi about Shiori, so he figured it would be less troublesome to just get his actual work out of the way before he headed to see his old teammate and friend.

Shiori had only been in Inoichi's presence a few times, but Shikaku knew Inoichi had noticed the… _peculiarity_ of his adopted daughter. No doubt, she was a genius. While a child of her intelligence was rare, there was precedence. What puzzled him was the way she understood things that should have been beyond her realm of experience. He wasn't hesitant to admit to himself that he was inexperienced with the whole "parenthood" thing, but some things were just obvious.

No matter how smart a kid was, they shouldn't idly comment to themselves—when they thought nobody was listening—that the distribution of technology in the world must be somehow suppressed by the existence of chakra. They shouldn't be irritated at being told they could fit into an established shinobi team formation, just like their parents. And they shouldn't be secretly practicing shurikenjutsu.

Doing it openly, and bragging about their prowess at "playing ninja?" Begging for toy weapons and dreaming about being the next Hokage? Even, perhaps, asking for tips and wanting the parental attention that came from being taught one-on-one? Sure. All those things were normal.

Hiding your daily weapons training for over a month was not normal. And, really, with the intensity she put in to her practice and the growing skill she was displaying, it was impossible to pretend it was anything but training. She may have pulled Shikamaru into it, but Shikaku knew his son was just following along with his idolized "big sister."

No, now that he thought back to it, she'd been training even before this shuriken stuff started. He'd caught glimpses of her running around and around in the area right behind their house. Sure, Shiori was the type of kid that liked to play by herself. He'd been the same when he was young, before he'd been put on a genin team with Inoichi and Chouza. It was hard to play with other kids your age when you were so much more intelligent than them. But Shiori wasn't the type of kid that thought running laps by herself until she fell down from exhaustion was _play_.

Inoichi was at the flower shop, in the back, so after he'd finished at his own office, Shikaku shamelessly interrupted the bookkeeping the other man was slogging through and lounged in the spare chair. "Something's going on with Shiori."

Inoichi didn't look up from his numbers, frowning as he lost his place and had to start the calculation from the beginning. "She's a genius."

"She's training in secret. She has been, for a while. I just didn't realize till recently."

Inoichi looked up, at that, and then set down his pencil with a sigh. "And why did you come to me?"

"Don't be troublesome. You know you're the best of us at the more…psychological side of things. I understand people fairly well, but…" he trailed off, with an irritated sigh, as if he couldn't be bothered to continue.

"You want my help dissecting her psychological state," Inoichi said flatly. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last. Shikaku was intelligent, but Inoichi understood people. Chouza would be the main force and tear an enemy apart, guided by Shikaku, who used Inoichi's insight to augment his own battle plans. It was a team dynamic that worked well both in and outside of battle.

"But I'm swamped with this bookkeeping…" Inoichi wore a faintly sad look.

Shikaku huffed, and plucked the pencil away from him, sliding the ledger and stacks of receipts toward himself. "I'll trade you. You talk, I calculate."

Inoichi smiled in smug satisfaction and leaned back. "You're worried, because she was able to successfully keep this training, or whatever she's been doing, a secret from you until now. With her intelligence, even at that age it's not so surprising, since you weren't predisposed to be suspicious of her. It's the level of mistrust inherent in keeping the secret that worries you."

Shikaku relaxed. He'd known Inoichi would understand. He always did.

"Tell me what's been going on, from the beginning," Inoichi said.

"Well, most recently, she's been secretly making her own shuriken, and then training herself and Shikamaru in their use. It's those paper ones, like we used to make as kids?" When Inoichi nodded, he continued. "But she's been coating them in some kind of flour paste so they're much harder, and fly relatively true. Yoshino noticed the paper disappearing pretty quickly." He chuckled, "I'm not sure Shiori thought that part through, but it shows she's just a kid, I guess. Yoshino figured out what was going on pretty quickly, because Shikamaru's not quite as cunning as his sister, and Yoshino found his stash of 'shuriken' when cleaning his room.

"At first, we thought it was cute. I assumed they'd let it slip sooner or later, but they haven't. So I started dropping little hints, giving them opportunities to bring it up. Shikamaru hasn't learned how to lie yet, even if he doesn't say anything, so his face always gives him away. But Shiori…" he shook his head.

"There's more."

"Yes." Shikaku told Inoichi the things he'd been thinking about on his way over, methodically laying out the things he'd noticed, and the things he'd speculated. The way her brain made leaps of logic with seemingly no connecting information. The way she looked at people sometimes, like she knew old secrets about them that even they had already forgotten. He spoke for a while, and then asked his friend, "What have you noticed?"

Inoichi hesitated. "She…doesn't trust you or Yoshino. She keeps track of your every move, and she seems to be constantly aware of anyone who moves into her blind spot. In fact, I'm not sure that I've ever seen her let down her guard. But maybe that's just because she won't relax in _my_ presence." He paused, as he saw the pained look on Shikaku's face. "For you and Yoshino, maybe it's not so much that she doesn't trust you, but that she doesn't feel safe with you. I'm not saying it's your fault."

"If not ours, then whose?"

"I've seen this before. When children experience traumatic events, or have been hurt by those they had a close relationship with, often they withdraw into themselves. With Shiori, that attitude of isolation is probably only exacerbated by her intelligence."

Shikaku continued writing figures onto the ledger almost lazily, but his fingers were clenched hard around the pencil, betraying his tension. "Keep talking."

"Intelligent children often think that their own understanding will never betray them. They make assumptions about things. About people, their motivations, cause and effect…" he continued, despite Shikaku's eyes widening in revelation. "I can see you already have an idea what's caused your problems with her. From what you've told me, Shiori's fluid intelligence is…astounding. She's making connections based on information she must have picked up _in passing_. I wouldn't be surprised if she has hyperthymesia. But she's pre-disposed to an attitude of forced self-reliance."

Shikaku's fingers dropped the pencil and slipped into their "thinking" pose, and after a moment, he spoke. "We've been treating her like a child. An intelligent child, to be sure. But from all those little gaps, the things we leave out of conversation because it's not something you talk to children about… Because I want her to have a childhood away from death and war, and forget the taint it's already left on her life…she's filling in those gaps with her own speculation. And whatever it is she's thinking, she doesn't feel secure because of it."

Inoichi sighed. "I think that's likely. But bear in mind, I'm _speculating_ based on the very limited amount of time I've spent with her, and your own second-hand reports of her behavior. I could be completely off the mark. In situations like this, communication is key. If we really want to know what's going on inside her head, she needs to tell us. You should talk to her, rather than speculating on your own."

So Shikaku went home, spoke to his wife about the conversation he'd just had, and sought out his two children on the edge of the Nara forest, far enough away from his house not to be seen easily from within, but not so close to the forest, which they were forbidden to enter, that they would get into trouble.

They were practicing with the shuriken again, this time a mock battle between the two of them. He hid himself, far enough away that Shiori's chakra sensing couldn't pick him up. It wasn't hard. They were barely more than babies, and had no idea how to find a shinobi that was hiding.

He was a bit surprised when Shikamaru aimed for the eyes, then more so when Shiori praised him for it. When she held the mostly harmless paper "weapon" to his son's neck and tried to teach him a lesson about trust, his eyes widened, and he stepped in, walking just up to the edge of Shiori's perception and stopping.

She stiffened when she heard the sound of his voice, and turned around slowly, dread radiating out from her tiny body. Then her jaw lifted almost defiantly. He wasn't fooled when she adjusted her body language again, hiding the signs of rebellion poorly. He didn't need to be Inoichi to read her.

"Why are you surprised?" she parried.

So it wasn't to be easy. Not that he had expected it would be, but it still made him sigh. First, he'd attack the obvious weak link, he decided. Shikamaru was worried by the atmosphere, and despite his reluctance to get his sister in trouble, he wouldn't lie to his father.

Shiori stepped in when he continued to make his son uncomfortable, drawing attention back to herself, and admitting to being the instigator of the shuriken affair. That was good. At least his son had been able to get under her defensive emotional shell.

"And who taught you?" Shikaku asked.

"My okaa-chan taught me." The words held significance.

And with that, he grew, somehow, a little more tired. She never called _Yoshino_ Okaa-chan, though his wife had tried to encourage it, once Shiori became part of the family. Shikaku sent his son back to the house, and took some small comfort from the boy once again attempting to defend Shiori, reluctant to leave her alone. But the boy did leave, and it was just the two of them. Him, and his adopted daughter, who looked at him as if he might hurt her.

"Let's watch the clouds, Shiori." He moved to a spot with some larger rocks, and sat on the ground, leaning against one of them and facing the sky. Cloud-watching was an activity he'd shared with his own father, when he was young, and the world was…simpler. It helped him to think, and also to relax from the sheer _pressure_ his brain sometimes forced on him. It didn't take long for him to notice that at that moment she didn't find the pastime similarly relaxing. Though perhaps that was because of him. "I'm not angry, Shiori. You can relax. I really do just want to talk." She didn't seem to believe him, if the tension in her spine and jaw was any indication, but he continued. "You've been training, and not just with the shuriken, I know."

She clenched her fists, and then unclenched them and surreptitiously wiped them against her legs. Sweaty palms. But she didn't say anything.

He hated this. "You've been training your body. I've noticed you exercising," he said, and then stared at her expectantly, determined to get some sort of response from the silent child.

Her gaze was carefully blank, as if frozen, and she nodded slowly, jerkily. Was she truly that afraid?

He would just have to keep going. He couldn't change anything if he didn't understand her, or what she was thinking. Maybe the fear would have more of a contrasting positive effect on her, once she realized it was baseless. "Why are you training?"

She stared again, stalling for time or an answer, perhaps. "Umm, to get stronger." Her voice was small and surprisingly hoarse.

He frowned. "I won't accept vague answers, Shiori. I know you're intelligent enough to give coherent, thoughtful responses." He needed her to communicate with him, if he was going to fix this. He wasn't like Inoichi, who would be able to carry on a conversation with her based on her body language and gazing into her eyes alone.

"I'm going to get stronger, so I can protect the people I care about. So that no one else dies." Her voice grew smaller as she spoke, and she looked down to her own feet.

He followed her gaze, and noticed how they were dwarfed by his own. He swallowed, while she wasn't examining him. She was painfully tiny, to be saying things like that. "That's a pretty big job for one person," he said casually.

"I'm not deluded!" her small voice piped high, and she scowled at him. "I realize protecting everyone with only my own power will be impossible. I'm not always going to be there, and sometimes the enemy will be more than what I can deal with alone. That's why I'mg going to make sure the people I care about are strong, too. I'll teach them to protect themselves." Her mouth snapped shut, as if she regretted her outburst.

He was careful to keep his face calm as he evaluated her words. Did she feel…responsible? For what had happened to her parents? No, maybe it was just that she felt the possibility of it happening again weighing down on her. She'd been introduced to the true danger of the world at a young age, and was smart enough to understand at least some of what it meant, and what it might mean for the future. Did she understand what it meant for someone to die? She must. Though he remembered an aunt passing away when he himself was little older than her. He hadn't understood. He wondered where she was, and cried when he couldn't go play at her house anymore. Slowly, he stopped thinking about his aunt as often, and it wasn't until he was older that he understood what death truly was. But then again, he had a strong suspicion he hadn't been as smart as Shiori.

She understood, and was making plans to stop it from happening again, up to and including gathering strong allies. "You made friends with Neji, on your own initiative," he said. "That's not like you, usually. You play with some of the other clan kids if they ask you, sometimes, but never otherwise." It wasn't phrased as a question, but it still required an answer.

"I heard people talking," she said slowly. "They said Neji is a prodigy." She emphasized the word "prodigy," as if it felt strange in her mouth. "I'm a prodigy, too. I heard you and your friends talking about it in the other room one time, And Okaa-chan always said I was. At first I thought the other kids were really stupid, but then I realized it's just because me and Shika are really smart, even though we're little. I wanted to talk to Neji, because I thought he might be like me."

"Oh? And was he?"

"Yeah," she nodded. "That's why I wanted to be friends."

Oh, she was clever. Not only with the deduction reasoning she'd just admitted to, but the lie. Because she _was_ lying, at least in part. At least by omission. "And what about protecting everyone, all your friends?" he prodded. "It would make it easier to do that if they were like you, right? People who could be strong and also protect themselves." He knew the answer already. She had approached the genius Hyuuga child for his strength, and though a desire for friendship with someone on her own level might have been part of it, it wasn't the main motivator for her running off on her own in the middle of a festival and properly introducing herself to the clan heads, and then proceeding to ingratiate herself with the lonely son of the branch head.

"…Yeah," she admitted, as if the word had been forced from her. Which it had, really. She was smart, maybe even cunning, but she couldn't hide by falsehood or redirection when he was watching so closely.

He considered telling Shiori that Hizashi had mentioned it to him later, subtly testing the waters to see if Shikaku had put her up to it. The other man had praised her manners, though he mentioned she was a bit bolder than was proper, and remarked upon how early they'd started training her. Shikaku had waved it off with studied apathy, and said she was just smart and bored, and then apologized if she'd bothered them.

Hizashi had stared at him just a moment too long, and then told him that Neji loved the turtle. That same night, Yoshino had told him about the mass paper shuriken manufacturing operation that was going on under their noses in attempted secrecy. If she'd shown this same cleverness in front of the Hyuuga, he could understand the other man's reaction. He wanted to probe the other man for information on what she might have revealed, how she'd acted, but that was out of the question. He couldn't admit to being outwitted by his two-year-old child to one of the highest ranking members of the Hyuuga.

He decided not to tell her that she'd been noticed, and that it had gotten back to him, just in case she learned from her mistake. She was already hiding enough from them. "Why can't you rely on us adults to protect you?" he asked instead. "That's our job, isn't it?" And there it was, the real question he'd been getting at all along. Why didn't she trust them?

She waited a while before answering, as if she understood the importance of the question just as he did, and finally said in a once again hoarse voice, "Sometimes, you won't be there. I'll be alone again." She cleared her throat, and looked away, as if it would bare too much for her to look at him directly.

He didn't need Inoichi for this one, at least. When had she been alone before? It was easy to figure out, but he asked anyway, tilting his head back and closing her eyes, to give her a sense of privacy.

"My…family…died. I was alone then." The pain in her voice was obvious, and real. It was too raw to be anything else.

He hated the Kyuubi afresh in that moment. She was so tiny. So small and young. Too little for words like that to come from her lips. But then he sighed, long and deep. It wasn't just the Kyuubi that had left her alone. And if he knew it, then so did she. Except she didn't know how they'd searched frantically for her.

She didn't know the horror of wondering if she might be one of those pulverized bodies that had been found in the wreckage of her street. Or one of the bodies that weren't even left for them to find evidence of, vaporized by the Kyuubi. She didn't know, because they hadn't told her. They thought they were keeping her safe, and like Inoichi had guessed, she had come to an entirely different conclusion. She thought he and Yoshino had abandoned her when she needed them most, and was waiting for them to do it again. Of course she wouldn't trust them. Of course she would feel the need to protect herself, both physically, and from the chance of loss.

So he told her, speaking in a low voice, about what had happened, in those days between the Kyuubi and them taking her home. Despite his new resolution to treat her less like a fragile child, he still left some things out. If he and Inoichi were right, she would likely fill in the blanks herself, but no matter how smart she was, a child didn't need to hear all the horrors of the world. When he finished with his story, all she said was, "Oh."

He stood then, and helped her up from the ground before heading back towards their home. "Shiori, we never meant for you to be left alone in the orphanage. You must have been scared." He reached down and took her hand, slowing down so as to not outpace her tiny legs. "But I promise, we're not going to leave you alone. You don't have to only depend on yourself. If you need help, you can come to me."

He watched her valiantly resist the telltale signs of tears, and pretended not to notice. He'd been right, then, about her assumptions. He stopped outside the back door and gently squeezed the fragile fingers within his own. "Do you believe me? That you can count on us, on me?" He knew immediately that what was broken hadn't been mended, as she met his gaze with naked consideration, the traces of tears gone.

"We'll see," she said simply, not quite cold, but not allowing any vulnerability to show through, either.

He swallowed at that surprisingly painful pair of words, but nodded. "I'll show you, over time." And he would. He was new to this whole "father" thing still, but it was obvious his children, this one especially, needed more from him than he'd been giving.

Starting immediately. Yoshino called Shikamaru back to the kitchen when he ran to make sure Shiori was alright, knowing that Shikaku probably still wanted some time alone with Shiori. "Sit down, Shiori. I'm going to teach you how to play shogi." He spent most of the next thirty minutes explaining the game to her, and while her rapid comprehension of the rules was impressive, it was increasingly less surprising. Inoichi had suggested she might have hyperthymesia, which was an extremely rare ability to remember everything about one's own life experiences. Inoichi had told him about it, and if he remembered correctly—and he knew he did—it could be more of a curse than a blessing. But combined with her intelligence, it might explain some of the strange thoughts and deductions Shiori had revealed.

He'd need to test out the limits of said memory and intelligence, but that could be done slowly for now. "You remember your parents teaching you the phrase to say if you were lost?" he asked casually.

"Yes," she replied, frowning as she tried to fit too many pieces into her stubby fingers and dropped some.

"How far back _do_ you remember?"

"Hmm, a long time, I guess."

"Shiori," he said, staring at her with unstated command and expectation.

"…I remember being in Okaa-chan's belly, a little bit. It's kind of blurry. I didn't know things, back then."

He stood up and walked with her to the bathroom to help her wash her hands before lunch. "That is a long time," he agreed simply, careful to keep his voice controlled. Inside, he was a little less relaxed.

She had memories before her own birth? He'd thought that children didn't begin to truly retain memories until after they learned to speak, to label their new experiences in their mind. But, what that meant, quantitatively, he could barely even comprehend. What kind of brain must she have, to have memories remaining from when her body was still in the process of forming?

He was mostly silent through lunch, and though he and Yoshino exchanged a few glances, he waited until they were preparing to sleep that night to share his thoughts and the story of what had happened that afternoon.

"I should have known," Yoshino said, looking down and shaking her head. "I should have known she needed more from us. It's just…she seemed to be adjusting so well! She never talks about my sister or her father. She seemed happy!" her voice was pitching higher as she went, and she visibly tried to calm down.

"Shiori is…special," he said. "It would have been hard _not_ to underestimate her, because the reality is so absurd."

She turned then, catching on to the undertones in his mood. "What are you thinking?"

"She's frightening," he said, and paused when he saw the growing thunderous look on his wife's face.

"I can't believe the words coming out of your mouth, Shikaku! That girl needs our love and affection, and we're _damn_ well going to give it to her. _Both_ of us." One forefinger was out and pointing at him, while the other hand rested imperiously on her waist.

He didn't grow angry. That was part of what he loved about his wife. She stood up for what she believed in, passionately and without shame, and she wouldn't accept any less from him. She was just a little quick to "stand up," sometimes. "Of course," he said slowly, allowing her time to process the words and calm before he continued. "I only meant that when I think about what she could become in the future, it's almost frightening. If she's not guided properly, and things go… _wrong_ ," he knew their thoughts were both going to those deserters, the missing-nin, filthy traitors to the village that they were. "She'll be strong." They both knew what he meant, the dangers Shiori could pose.

"But we're not going to let that happen," Yoshino said, sitting down beside him, close enough that their arms touched.

"No," he agreed. "I'm going to start taking an active hand in her progress. She wants power, so I'll show her that she can get it through the proper channels, and in the meantime ensure that her psychological state is where it should be. She'll understand loyalty, if a temptation otherwise ever arises."

* * *

6/6/16: I'm sorry about the wait, guys! This chapter gave me a bit of trouble, maybe because it's been a long time since I've written anything in third person. I'm a little nervous about how this reads to people who aren't me, honestly, but it's awesome to be able to play with different things, writing-wise. It's a little bit longer than the average, so at least that's something. I've been really busy lately, and I've just flown across the U.S. to spend some time with family, but I'm hoping I get a good amount of time to write this upcoming week. In fact, this chapter was finished while I was between flights.

You guys should expect a bonus chapter or two, for the wait. Also, we're halfway to 100 reviews, and the bonus chapter that will come with _that_. I'm taking requests into account, so if you have an "Interlude" POV that you want to see upcoming soon, let me know.

Also, I'm going to start answering common or insightful review questions here, if I can answer in a sentence or two.

Q/A: Does Shikaku know what all Shiori has been training?

-No. He honestly doesn't know about the chakra exercises. Someone else does, though, and you might have noticed the hints in the chapter above.


	10. Year 2, Week 6

It should come as no surprise that I rethought my secrecy measures.

All the things that had run through my mind as, "Stupid!" when I'd thought I'd been completely discovered? It's because they _were_ stupid. I'd been being complacent, and when you were surrounded by what amounted to professional spies and assassins, that just didn't cut it.

So I made a mental list of things that needed to be fixed, and tried to figure out how to implement it while drawing as close to zero attention as I could. I knew Shikaku and Yoshino's attention would be on me more than usual, after discovering the _first_ secret, which was actually relatively minor. I didn't want to reveal the _rest_ of my secrets by being suspicious while trying to make secrets more secure.

Namely, I needed to do something about the stolen books, and find a way to make sure my jutsu and chakra shaping exercises weren't discovered. The problem was, it was much easier to say that than to actually find a way to implement it. If I was older, it would have been different. But I was just a little over two years old. I had no privacy. I had no autonomy. It would be suspicious if I even tried to get more of either of those things. If I changed my habits drastically, that would also be suspicious.

It was a problem.

So I made a plan. I'd been occasionally practicing my chakra exercises outside, but as Shikaku had shown, that wasn't safe. I'd been like a child with my hands over my eyes, thinking that just because I couldn't see anyone, no one else could see me. But people _could_ see me, without me ever knowing of their presence.

I knew from working with Yoshino on my own chakra sensing that some experienced and strong shinobi developed a kind of sixth sense for chakra use near them, but it was rare, and tended to be more like a danger sense for use in the midst of battle. If either of them could have sensed chakra use, she wouldn't have kept it a secret when she was having so much trouble training me in the same thing.

Honestly, the safest thing would have been not to practice with my chakra at all. But of course that wasn't an option. So I had to practice where I was least likely to be discovered. That was, ironically I thought, in my room, with the door closed, and silently. No anime-esque grunts or shouts of effort. And even then, I would need to be careful. I would practice when Shikaku was at work, and Yoshino somewhere else, either in the kitchen or gone, as far away from my space as possible.

Taking the stolen books somewhere else to hide them wasn't feasible. Both because I had nowhere to take them, and because I would have to sneak away to read them. After some extensive thought, I found what I hoped was a good solution.

The floors of our house were wooden, and though beautiful, they were old and creaked a lot. Yoshino liked to cover them with beautiful rugs, because her feet got cold easily, and she preferred walking around barefoot to the more conventional indoor slippers that seemed to be common in the Japanse-slash-Naruto world. Suffice it to say, I realized the wood was creaking because there was space underneath the planks.

My bookcase was in the far corner of the room, and one of the smaller planks right next to it was particularly creaky. The bookcase just happened to be conveniently resting on a rug that also covered that creaky plank.

I knelt beside it and folded over the rug to reveal the floor beneath, then stepped on the plank to watch it bend slightly. I examined what held it together, and was happy to see that it was little more than some nails. Then I covered it back up with the rug, and set my Nara mind to work.

I had experience hiding things from adults, in my previous life. I'd been a bit of a reader, and especially liked the very genres that were forbidden to me by a strictly religious mother. I'd learned that I got caught when I got sloppy. If I started to relax my system of hiding reading material, and left room for failure, Murphy's law would come in to play, and I would eventually be discovered, confronted, and, of course, punished. Not that that stopped me.

But in this world, the punishment might be a little more serious than being hit and grounded. And instead of working on the same level of intelligence as my opponent, I had to work off the assumption they were better than me.

I had to assume that Yoshino and Shikaku were at least…five times as observant as I was. I mean, shinobi were literally trained to notice small details, since discrepancies would alert you if you were under a genjutsu. Even if I was doing my best, analyzing every action and possibility, I couldn't match them. The only reason I'd gotten away with anything so far was because they severely underestimated me, and perhaps even brushed aside things they'd noticed because of those preconceptions. Now I didn't have that advantage any more. At least not like I had prior to screwing up.

I took an extra long nap in the afternoon, and then waited up that same night till I was sure Yoshino and Shikaku were asleep. Then I reached under my pillow for a short strand of discarded wire I'd found in the neighborhood, and got out of my futon, moving glacially slowly. I could hear the sound of my own heartbeat, I was so quiet, and after every tiny rustle of cloth against cloth, or the slightest creak of my floor, I froze and counted to some random multiple of one hundred before continuing.

I folded up the corner of the rug, and unwound the wire, carefully shimmying it under the head of one of the nails keeping the board down. It was one of the wires used for jutsu, but it was too short to be useful for that purpose, which was no doubt why this piece had been discarded. It was about as thick as the low note string on a guitar, and I had to step on the board near the nail to open up the space to slip it under.

I wrapped the wire almost all the way around the head of the nail, then wrapped the ends around both my fists, and pulled. It didn't do much more than put a painful line across my palms. So I tiptoed back across the room to my laundry basket, grabbed the dirtiest clothes I could find, and tiptoed back, still careful to stop and wait for a random amount of time with every involuntary sound I created.

I wrapped a layer of cloth around both fists, then squatted and gathered up the wire again, this time wrapping it several times around my protected hands. Instead of just pulling with my arms this time, I thrust with my legs, basically doing the rising half of a squat, but with the nail providing the resistance instead of weights.

It worked, though I felt like I was about to rip my arms out of their sockets, and the wire scored lines into my palm. The nail budged, and then shot out, and it was only through luck that it landed on the sound-cushioning folded over rug instead of the floor. I froze, then let out a silent sigh of relief, and went back across the room for more dirty laundry, which I laid out around myself in case I wasn't so lucky next time. The sound of the nail hitting the floor might wake Shikaku or Yoshino.

I could have used the edge of a knife, instead of the wire, maybe, but that presented multiple problems, in that I would first have to steal a knife from the kitchen without Yoshino noticing, and I might accidentally damage the knife while prying up nails with it. Plus, unlike the backs of hammers, which were angled specifically to pull out nails, a knife would be hard to get leverage with, when working on a flat surface, and without my whole body working at it as one, I didn't have the strength needed to overcome that.

Then, I repeated the nail removing process three more times. By that time, my hands were aching, and my leg, back, and arm muscles had decided to mutiny. I placed all four nails together, and knelt down to try and pry the board up. It didn't want to come loose, at first, and I couldn't get a good grip on it.

I was just about to become frustrated when I realized I could do magic, and should stop whining. I channeled chakra to my hand, laid my palm flat to the surface of the board, and pulled up. The wood rose with my modified wall-walking technique, and I wrapped my other arm around the board, pulling it away from the floor and setting it gently on top of the rug, careful not to make any noise at this critical time.

Underneath the planks, there was a few inches of space. Not enough to crawl in or anything, even for someone as small as me. But enough room for books to fit. I stood up and took my books from their hiding spot, then laid them carefully out, away from the opening I'd created. I would have to put my arm in and reach for them by feel when I needed to get one out, but this way, even if someone took out the board and looked into the floorspace, the books still wouldn't be immediately noticeable.

Then I replaced the board, slipped the nails back into place, knowing that they were loosened enough I could remove them whenever I wanted, and rolled the rug back over the floor. I put my dirty clothes back in the basket, and slipped under the cover of my futon.

That was the second problem, solved.

The third was not to arouse suspicion with my behavior, and would no doubt be the hardest.

* * *

Shikaku started spending a lot more time with me after partially exposing my secret activities. When he got home from work, he would check in on Shikamaru and I first, and then hang around with us for an hour or so, asking questions and… _playing_ with us. Shika loved it, and started waiting often by the door for Shikaku to come home, when the usual time came around.

Once Shikaku was confident I'd learned the rules of shogi, he played short, easy games with me, more for the teaching aspect than either of us trying to win, as he'd give me advice on my next move, and explain _why_ , almost every time.

Shikamaru would sit beside us and watch our back and forth interaction, dark eyes silently taking in the strategy. I knew he'd be better than me at games of strategy like shogi, once he grew up and put in the practice hours. I was smart enough to make up for it, but I didn't really have a _talent_ for the game.

What I really enjoyed was the shuriken practice Shikaku started us on. He came home one day with two small boxes for each of us, and casually handed them over. When I opened the first up, I saw closely stacked shuriken, colored bright orange. The other box had strangely shaped kunai, in the same glaring orange. When I took them out to inspect, I saw that the edges were blunted, but still sharp enough that if thrown with enough speed, they might embed themselves in the side of a tree instead of bending or bouncing off.

Shika had bright blue, and when he saw the "kid-safe," but still _real_ weapons, he leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Shikaku's leg, then mumbled a muffled, "thank you," into it. Then the boy pulled away and returned to unconvincing nonchalance, mimicking his dad's slightly slouched posture and struggling not to giggle aloud as he gazed down at the weapons in his hand with adoration.

I thanked Shikaku more sedately, but clutched the boxes of training weapons securely to my chest. When we ate at the table that evening, Shikamaru tore through his food, glancing eagerly at the weapons which he'd placed in a spot of honor right in front of his plate.

Yoshino smiled brightly at Shikaku, approval fairly radiating off her. Had she put him up to this? I was pretty sure Shikaku hadn't been the type to train Shikamaru in much more than shogi, along with some sporadic life advice, in the canon "Naruto."

But either way, I was grateful, as after eating, Shikaku took Shika and me out to the back, and with his own, non-blunted, kunai, carved a human outline into the bark of a large tree on the outskirts of the Nara forest. He then marked off the "kill" spots, and the "distraction" spots we would be aiming for. I would have been surprised, but I quickly realized that I wasn't on Earth anymore. Of course we'd be practicing killing or peripherally injuring a human shape, and not just try to get a bulls-eye on a ringed target. We were training to be shinobi, not champion marksmen.

Shikaku showed us the form for shuriken throwing first, as that's what we'd been doing before, but he demonstrated a few variations, each best for different things. Then, he had us practice throwing, correcting our forms. It didn't take me long to see how much it helped to have a teacher for things like this, as both my aim and throwing force almost instantly improved. The shuriken may have been mostly blunted, but they still sunk a centimeter or so into the tree trunk when I threw them, and the balance and weight was incomparable to paper shuriken. I was grateful for the bright coloring of our weapons when we had to find them to pick them up, because they stood out, unnaturally bright against pretty much everything. I realized that my set were Naruto's favorite color.

As Shika and I gathered up all the shuriken that had hit and missed our targets, my thoughts wandered a bit, to Naruto, who would be in the orphanage at this point in time. Was he alright? I almost snorted at my sentimentality. Of course he wasn't all right. The adults around him were no doubt psychologically scarring him for life at that very moment. And there was nothing that I could do.

We moved on to kunai after the shuriken were all gathered and safely slotted away back in their boxes. I pulled one of mine out and examined it curiously. It was bright orange, and blunted, of course, but even beyond that it didn't look like I'd expected it to. It was more like a throwing knife than the angular instrument with a long handle and a loop on the end that I'd come to expect from Kishimoto's rendition. It was flat, the handle didn't have a loop on the end, and the tip was asymmetrically angled. I frowned, and looked over to Shika, whose were the same as mine, and then to Shikaku, who was holding a kunai that looked like ours.

He noticed my expression, apparently. "Just like shuriken come in many different designs, so do kunai. The standard kunai you've probably seen a lot of before were adapted many, many years ago from farming instruments."

I nodded, because I vaguely remembered hearing something like that before.

"A lot of shinobi still use the standard kunai today. I used one to make the target here," he pointed to the tree, "but in reality, they're often not the best tool for the job. For a shinobi whose style of combat isn't reliant on projectiles, they work alright. They're light enough not to slow you down too much, and sturdy enough to block a blow from another weapon, if needed. They can even be thrown. But they're unwieldy. And," he paused, reaching down to poke Shikamaru's forearm, "they take a bit more strength than either of you two have."

Shikamaru scowled, then raised his arm and flexed, comparing his bicep with my own.

I held back a snicker and pretended I hadn't noticed.

"This kunai design is called north wind. They are better for throwing, though they're not designed to block a heavy blow from another weapon. That doesn't matter, because, once again, you're not strong enough to block a blow anyway." He flicked a look toward Shika again.

My eyebrow twitched, wanting to rise and give Shikaku a knowing look. But I held back, because that seemed a little too adult, and I was trying to watch myself after being discovered last time.

"If your opponent is unarmed, or you're ambushing them, these could also be used as hand-held stabbing knives, though you'll need careful aim to make sure you hit a vital point. Even the non-blunted version of this knife isn't very sharp on the edge, so they can't be used to slash. Now, you're going to learn to throw these without the end-over-end spin, so that you'll still be able to stick the knife from anywhere, no matter the exact distance from the target."

He showed us a couple different way to throw the knives, and then had us practice for the next half hour or so.

I fell in love with the length and weight of the north wind kunai, and the way they sank in to the bark of the tree with a satisfying thunk. Real weapons were so much nicer than their paper imitations.

As Shika and I walked with Shikaku back to the house, I said to Shikaku, "Thanks for teaching us."

He nodded, a faint smile softening his perpetually frowning face.

My fingers almost itched for the feel of cold metal between them. I wondered how I might hide a couple shuriken or kunai on my person as a nasty surprise for any enemies who thought I was helpless. I bared my teeth slightly, restraining an eager smile, and then wiped it from my face when I caught Shikaku looking at me.

* * *

6/15/16: The North Wind throwing knife actually exists, and it's pretty cool. Google it, if you're interested


	11. Year 2, Month 6

I'd moved on to the next chakra exercise, which was leaf floating.

It matched its name. Basically, I had to expend enough chakra to propel the leaf away from my hand, but not so much that it shot away, and keep expelling chakra at a constant rate to keep the leaf floating. Then, float and spin. Then spin different directions, on different axes.

I wondered if, like the leaf spinning exercise, I might optimize this one, so I tried creating a chakra construct that just…stuck out of my hand and held the leaf solidly in the air, no need for the constantly expelling chakra like air to keep the leaf floating. That didn't work so well. It was like a way more advanced version of the chakra strings. Projecting chakra in a solid form outside of the body was hard. I eventually had to concede defeat, and go back to moving, invisible chakra streaming outward, learning to balance the leaf at various distances, then bob it up and down over my hand.

As I progressed with the chakra exercises, my learning speed increased. Or rather, my previous skills translated over, so I grasped the variations more quickly.  
After a month figuring that one out, I moved onto the suspension floating exercises, where I would stick a leaf to my hand, turn my palm downward, and then allow the leaf to fall till it hovered a few inches below my hand. It required me to balance both attracting a repelling forces with my chakra, and was once again a large step forward in difficulty. It was good exercise for similar basic principles to the chakra strings which still gave me such trouble, though.

After I judged myself sufficiently competent at that, I repeated all the leaf chakra exercises I'd learned till that point with a fist-sized rock. The weight and size made it harder, though I progressed faster the second time through due to having the theoretical side down. I didn't need any extra wall walking exercises to reach the perfect point of almost-exhaustion when working with the rock.

The trick was partially in the multitasking, but mostly just automatizing parts of the exercise through practice. Like…driving a car. At first, you have to focus on every little thing, but after a while, your subconscious takes up most of the processes, enough so that you can sing along to the radio while wondering if you have enough money for groceries that night, while driving.

All in all, it was six months before I'd mastered those exercises. It was…discouraging. I mean, sure, I could throw a practice shuriken or kunai pretty accurately, I'd memorized the information in the "Flora and Fauna for Young Kunoichi" scroll, and read through the two taijutsu and one genjutsu scrolls multiple times, and my cloak of invisibility jutsu was impressively effective…but I felt like I wasn't making much real progress. I was spending almost all my free time training in one way or another, every single day. Shouldn't there be more noticeable progress?

Despite reading the "Konoha Academy Rudimentary Taijutsu Stances" scroll and its companion, "Common Mistakes when Learning Taijutsu," I didn't want to get too far into taijutsu practice without a more experienced mentor. Small mistakes in the stances now would be harder to correct if I ingrained them into my muscle memory incorrectly, and would cause more serious problems at higher levels.

The bright spot was, after completing all those chakra shaping exercises, I figured I was ready to move on to the next kid's jutsu. It was really more of an escape skill than a jutsu. But like the kakuremino before it, it was intrinsically useful to the shinobi skill set. It was called the nawanuke no jutsu, which meant rope untying. Basically, you inserted your chakra into the spaces of a rope that was binding you, and used it to loosen and wriggle till you could escape.

I read over the instructions several times, but since I couldn't feasibly tie myself up, I just tied a fabric belt up into a knot and held it in my hands. Weaving chakra through the material was a bit difficult, but it wasn't beyond me. It didn't actually enter the strands of the rope, just weaved through the open spaces alongside them, gripping as it went. From there, it was only a matter of practice to move the belt as I wanted, and it was untied within minutes of my first attempt.

I frowned. Was I doing it wrong? It seemed a bit too easy. Then I sighed and smacked myself in the forehead. It was just another chakra manipulation exercise, disguised as a jutsu. And with all the practice I'd had in that area lately, of course it was easy. I practiced a few more times, trying to tie more complicated knots and stump myself, but when I'd both tied the knot myself and could push chakra through the bunched fabric in its entirety, it wasn't difficult to understand the structure, and from there untie it.

I tried tying the knot really, really tight, and that did make it a little harder, but only because of the force I needed to exert when untying, rather than a problem with my skill.

I unbound it once again, and flopped back on my futon with a satisfied sigh. Really, it wasn't much different from picking a knot apart with your fingers. Except it was much easier to get a "grip," and I could pull and push from multiple directions at once, as well as from the inside of the knot.

With a grin, I opened the jutsu book again. It felt good to master something so quickly. The next technique was harigane gappei, wire fusion. It was the solution to binding someone who knew the rope untying skill. Which was basically any ninja worth their forehead protector. The only problem was, it required wire to practice, and all I had was the short length I'd used to pull up the nails from my floorboard, which I didn't want to ruin in case I needed to use it for something else. I didn't have any way to get more, after all.

I flopped back to the bed again, good mood evaporated. I turned my head into my pillow to muffle sound and let out a frustrated scream. It felt satisfying, so I screamed again, this time flailing about tantrum-like with my arms and legs, beating them into the futon.

It did help a little, but ultimately didn't accomplish more than leaving me red-faced and hoarse. In my old life, when I felt like this, I would distract myself by reading a book, watching television, or really just anything that got me out of my own head. I didn't really have any hobbies in this world, though. Everything I did in my free time was training of some sort, and I really didn't feel like being around people at that moment.

So I took a nap, even though it wasn't my designated nap time.

When I woke, I felt much refreshed. I rolled off the futon and went through a series of stretches, slowly limbering up and relaxing my muscles. Maybe I was putting a little too much pressure on myself, I thought, as I stared up at the ceiling.

Maybe, I was just bored.

As my eyes started to prickle with the foreboding burn of tears, I sighed, and turned back to my pillow. Maybe I was just…sad. "I'm a magician now, you know," I whispered into thin air, as the tears trickled into my pillow. I'd learned the art of non-messy crying long ago. No sobbing, no sniffing, no tortured facial expressions. Just silent tears.

My brother would have loved the things I could do, now. And that made the tears keep running. Because despite the fact that in the end, the very end, I had saved him, it didn't really feel like it. Because he was alone, and I was alone, and we were separated by death. And I knew the feeling of desperate helplessness and the forced optimism of those months as he wasted away. And somehow, I couldn't escape the feeling that I hadn't really fixed anything with my trade.  
My family was gone.

But, at least I knew where he was, though we would probably never see each other again. I didn't believe in heaven, so at least now I didn't have to guess at the location or even existence of his soul, after death. It's just that I wasn't so sure I'd really saved him.

And I was lonely, and selfish. I knew that. I pushed myself up from the bed and wiped my face dry. Never again. I would not be helpless again, in the face of loss.

So I sat down, and got back to work.

* * *

1/1/2018: I'm back. This is a very short chapter, and not much happens. I'll be back again on January 17 with a longer chapter, and you'll get to meet quite a few of the canon characters along with Shiori.


	12. Year 2, Month 6, Week 2

Yoshino and Shikaku held a gathering at our house when Shikamaru turned two. Traditionally, this was the time to celebrate the heir's survival through infancy and introduce them to the world, but they weren't taking it too seriously, and so instead it was a lot more like a birthday party. These days, with the advent of medical progress within the villages, it was much rarer for children to die in infancy than it had been. High levels of chakra also helped to make a child healthy and hardy.

Shikamaru had been to two of these parties already, for Shino and Chouji, who were their respective clans' heirs, and had turned two before him. He wasn't very enthusiastic about his own party, especially since Yoshino had spent hours drilling him on proper hosting etiquette. I was actually more excited about it than him, because they had invited Neji on my request.

In fact, I would be meeting quite a few of the canon characters. Clans tended to stick together, and most of the canon characters around Naruto's age, and accordingly my own age, were clan kids. Which I really don't think was a coincidence. But that was beside the point.

The point was, first impressions are important. I'd met Chouji and Ino already a few times, but to be honest they were...babies. It was hard to think of them as anything more. They were passable companions to Shika, but they weren't overly smart, and while they would be somewhat important in the future, I'd known them since before they could talk. They weren't exciting. And they already looked up to me, so I didn't have to worry about making a good first impression.

But tonight I'd be meeting a huge number of future players. I was almost as nervous as Yoshino, though I tried to hide it. She'd taken me shopping again, and once again I'd averted her attempts to buy me cute girly clothes. This was a traditional gathering, sure, but we weren't Hyuuga, so I didn't go for another strictly traditional outfit like I'd done for the festival.

A slim black jacket that went down to mid-thigh and emphasized the shoulders more than the waist, and had a wide collar that made me look kind of like an Uchiha when I flipped it up, along with some sleek black pants that weren't baggy, but also didn't cling to my legs. "Easy peasy," I said, looking at myself in the mirror and struggling to put my hair up into a high ponytail.

Yoshino abandoned her attempts to tame Shika's spiky mop to help me with my long black hair, swatting away my hands and pulling brusquely till all the strands were pulled back into a mercilessly sleek ponytail. "You look..." she trailed off, eyes moving over my small body in the mirror.

"Serious," I said. Really, I looked professional. I hoped. At least as professional as a two-and-a-half year old could. But I didn't want to say that I was dressing to engender respect out loud.

Shika tried to escape at that point, and Yoshino's attention was diverted, as she yanked him back in front of the mirror and returned to struggling with his hair.

That evening, it was Shika's job to greet the guests at the door, welcome them, and direct them to the large dining room towards the back of our house that we never actually ate in as a family, but which the Nara clan leader of course had to have in his residence. I was helping Yoshino with the last minute coordination, and so I didn't really get to see everyone till they were already gathered and seated at the table.

I held my head high as I entered the room, resisting the urge to stare at all these canon characters that I knew, but had never actually met. It's hard to make an impressive entrance when you are three feet tall, but I did not fail for lack of trying. I sat on Shikamaru's right side, in the place of honor. I'll admit, it did make me want to wear a small smile of pride.

They'd tried to put Chouji there, but when Shika understood what it signified, he put his foot down and insisted that it be me instead. He wasn't the type of kid to throw a tantrum, scream, or cry. He just lazily informed Yoshino that he wanted me on his right, and when she tried to explain the clan politics involved, he tuned her out, and quietly repeated his demand when she'd run out of breath. So Chouji was on his left, and Ino in the seat beyond that.

On my right sat a small girl with dark blue hair. She was probably the smallest child there, and big pale eyes stared around with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Despite her age, she was sitting formally, her legs tucked under her body underneath the traditionally Japanese-style low table. Her head was held high, and she did a decent job of restraining the urge to fidget. Hinata. Her hair was long, clipped back with a demure flower ornament, no doubt given to her by her mother. Who was still alive at this point, I realized suddenly.

My eyes traveled down the table, and I saw Neji a few seats down, proportionately farther away on the social spectrum as a child of the branch house. Honestly, he wouldn't even be at the party if not for my specific request. He wasn't looking at me, but seemed to be aware of my gaze, because he gave a small nod, with an equally small twitch of the lips that might have been a smile, if we weren't in public. He looked much more comfortable with the formality than Hinata, and was not visibly restless.

On the far side of the long table sat the adults, with Shikaku mirroring Shikamaru as the "head." He officially started the meal, and when the food was laid out by the helpers we'd hired for the day, conversation finally broke out.

A bigger boy flanked Hinata on her other side, and across from him sat a smaller version, his black hair spiked up in the back, looking like a duck's tail feathers. Itachi, and duck-butt-hair Sasuke. Even if I hadn't been able to recognize them by their faces, the distinctive clan symbol on the back of Itachi's coat would have given it away. Itachi was the oldest child at the gathering, and he stood out because of it. All the other clan heirs were closer to my own age, which was strange all on its own, admittedly.

And going by the logic that this was a gathering of the clans and their heirs, it was a bit strange that Sasuke was even there. But then again, there were quite a few people that I didn't recognize toward the middle of the table, so I reminded myself that Kishimoto didn't show everything in canon "Naruto," and that _I_ didn't know everything now.

I bowed my head slightly to the tiny girl next to me. "Hello, my name is Nara Shiori," I said.

Her eyes widened in poorly disguised panic for an instant, but she quickly recovered and remembered her manners, returning my bow with a tiny, high pitched, "It is my pleasure to meet you. I am Hyuuga Hinata." She shared the careful formal enunciation that I'd noticed from Neji.

"Ahh," I nodded. "You're Neji's cousin, then?" I asked as if I didn't know. "He and I know each other already. We met at the festival a few months ago."

Neji had turned at the sound of his voice, and he too gave me a small bow. "It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Shiori-kun. I appreciate your gift."

"The turtle? How is he doing? Did you name him yet?"

"I have named the turtle Kamukame. He is fierce and quick. I feed him everyday," Neji said with a small tinge of that Hyuuga pride.

"Kamu...kame?" Itachi inserted from beside Hinata, basically stealing the words from my mouth.

I supressed a smile, and shared a quick look out of the corner of my eye with Itachi. In Japanese, it basically meant "biting turtle." It was the equivalent to naming a cat "Fluffy Kitty" or something.

"You're the one that gave Neji Kamukame?" Hinata asked, her interest in me suddenly growing beyond vague social apprehension at meeting a stranger.

I nodded.

"He's really cool! Neji is teaching him to do tricks! If you hold him in your hand above the water and tell him to 'dive!' he jumps down into the water and goes all the way to the bottom! Then you have to give him some food so he knows he did a good job..." Hinata trailed off as she realized she'd gained the attention of quite a few of the children around us. "Umm..." Her forefingers came up, pressing against each other repeatedly, and she averted her gaze, ducking her reddening face.

"That indeed sounds like an intelligent companion," Itachi said, saving her from the embarrassment. "Perhaps one day you will have to good luck to gain a familiar. They, too, are intelligent, and will help you in battle or other tasks when you call upon them. I'm hoping that my father will pass on the family contract to me soon."

I was about to ask about this when Shikamaru, at the foot of the table to my left, spoke up loudly. "He's the one you gave a tuwtle to?" He pointed, pretty rudely, at Neji, who bristled in response.

"Yes..." I nodded, wondering at Shikamaru's seeming irritation. "I won it at one of the stall games."

He turned to me. "You nevew bwought _me_ an awesome animal." His accusing stare and the tension was bringing even more attention toward the conversation.

'Oh...' I thought to myself. 'Someone's feeling a bit jealous.' "Well," I said aloud, "I taught _you_ that super secret ninja art. I haven't shown that to anyone else. And it made Shikaku-oji get us our practice weapons, you know."

Shikamaru glanced back to Neji then, and gave a surprisingly superior little smirk. "I guess that's twue. Shiowi only twains with _me_."

Hinata was looking back and forth between all of us, seeming to shrink farther toward the floor as she grew more uncomfortable.

Chouji's mouth was too full to talk, but he patted Shikamaru on the back, hard enough to rock the smaller boy forward and divert his stare temporarily.

Ino was just watching the exchange with interest, and suppressing little giggles to herself, seeming to feed off the bit of drama in the air.

Shino and Kiba had been watching the exchange from the across the table. Shino, who didn't yet have the huge coat that covered half his face, but did have the little black glasses, stayed silent and unresponsive enough that I wasn't sure what was going on in his head.

Kiba, on the other hand, butted in loudly, proclaiming that _he_ was going to have a nin-dog when he got old enough, which was cooler than any turtle. He began to brag about how awesome and cool the dog was going to be, and how together they'd be the strongest ninja team anyone in Konoha had ever seen. It was distracting enough that it dispersed the awkwardness, but I breathed a silent sigh of relief that I didn't have to deal with the kid's attention-seeking ways on a daily basis.

"You've begun ninja training already, Shiori-kun?" Itachi asked. His voice was innocently questioning, but his eyes were narrower, and I'm pretty sure he didn't believe Shikamaru, or he thought our training was just kid's play.

"I have," I said. "I've been learning shurikenjutsu for the last six months. My skill is nothing amazing, but I'm getting better quickly, I think." I was displaying speech patterns above my age level, even more so than what I normally would display around the house. But I needed to make an impression, once again.

Itachi's eyebrows raised, and he looked toward Shikaku at the adult end of the table, then back at me. "Forgive me, but how old are you, again? I don't remember your introduction ceremony."

The corner of my mouth curled up in a smile. I had his attention, I hoped. Now to push things a bit farther. "I'm two and a half. And you don't remember my introduction ceremony because I didn't have one. Shika is the heir, not me. We're technically cousins. My parents were killed in the Kyuubi attack." Itachi must have known I wasn't an heir, because he _was_ one. The question about my introduction ceremony, at least, was a ruse.

Itachi's dark eyes grew even darker, and his lips tightened. "I see. I'm sorry, Shiori-kun. I did not mean to bring up painful memories."

"We all share those memories, no need to apologize. I'm not the only one who lost something that night. But if not for the shinobi who fought to protect the village with their lives, it would have been even worse. I really respect them."

"You want to become a shinobi?" He asked, with just a hint more interest. "I, too, am working toward that noble goal. I hope to make my father, and the clan, proud."

I was suddenly aware of how young he was, in reality. He couldn't have been older than seven. He would graduate the Academy soon, in canon, and make chuunin not long after. The pressure from his father and the other Uchiha clan leaders had to already be pressing on him. But he hadn't yet tasted death or the reality of missions, and he was optimistic about his future. So I smiled at him, making it a little more real than the blank innocence that I often portrayed to those older than me. "How old were you when you started training?" I asked.

"Three. I entered the Academy last year."

Sasuke piped up then, my first time hearing him speak. "Itachi-nii is awesome! He's probably going to graduate soon, already! I heard Otou-san say so. I'm going to be an awesome ninja, too, some day." The bright, almost puppy-dog like look on his face was in stark contrast to the Sasuke I remembered from canon. And with the little duck-butt of hair I could see poking up behind his head, the little boy looked even more adorable.

"So you'll be a genin soon. You must have worked hard." I glanced at Neji, who wasn't looking at us, but who also wasn't obviously looking at or paying attention to anyone _else_. "I'm not afraid of hard work, either!" I declared. "I'm not the clan heir like you, but I want to protect the people I care about, too." I glanced pointedly at Shikamaru, and Itachi's eyes flicked quickly to his own little brother. "I'd like to start taijutsu training soon."

"Have you talked to your uncle about this?" Itachi asked with an air of aged wisdom. No doubt a mannerism he'd picked up from his father or one of the other influential, older members in his clan. "He seems fairly reasonable, and ambition to better oneself is an admirable trait in any shinobi. There are any number of private taijutsu trainers he might secure for you. Plenty of chuunin around would jump at the chance to train the adopted daughter of the Nara clan head. Especially when she's a genius." He said the last in a lower voice, and as a statement, rather than praise or flattery. "The village often runs on connections, under the surface. That's what my father says. I'm sure Nara-sama knows someone who could train you, who would be happy for the connection. Plus, something like that would look good on the resume of any chuunin who wanted to make tokubetsu jounin."

I smiled, as he'd unwittingly opened up the perfect path for me to lead the conversation down. "I'm sure Shikaku-oji would be happy for me to continue training, especially if we were able to help improve friendships with others in the village. Inter-clan cooperation is very important. We Naras know that." I nodded wisely. "Perhaps my trainer could be someone who would be good for making friends between their family and my own." By which I meant, I wanted to forge political connections between the clans, and play off of the nepotism so deeply rooted in the village. Except I couldn't say that in the body of a two year old.

Itachi nodded. "Yes, that's a good plan. I'm sure if you phrase the request to him like that, he'd be open to it."

"Is there anyone in your clan that you know might be interested in the job? It seems sad that there isn't a stronger alliance between us." I kept my face as innocent as I could, and hoped that Itachi had not yet been trained in the infiltration and espionage tactics that would make it easier for him to spot a misdirection.

He did give me a strange look, but rather than suspicious, it was appraising. "You are proving even more intelligent than I expected. That's an interesting idea. I can think of a couple Uchiha chuunin who might be interested, but I'm not sure. I will talk to my father about this. I'm sure he will be interested, and perhaps he can recommend a list of people for the job."

Of course his father would be interested. The Uchihas were proud, and his clan had been struggling just to keep the influence they had in the village, after the Kyuubi attack and the suspicion it had thrown on them. Danzo was no doubt doing his best to spread the idea that the Sharingan must have been used to turn the Kyuubi against Konoha. I mean, yes, technically that is what happened. But the village Uchiha were innocent of it, and the increasingly ridiculous restrictions and distrust, along with their oversized pride, would lead them to mutiny in a few years.

An increased alliance with the Nara, who had a modestly large amount of influence in the village, might do them good. And they could pretend not to care that they were picked over the Hyuuga, since both clans produced master taijutsu specialists, while really using it as fuel in their constant battle of one-upmanship.

"That sounds great! I'll talk to my Oji-san, too. Thank you, Uchiha-kun!" I leaned forward so I could see Sasuke. "Your brother is pretty cool, Sasuke-kun," I said with a grin to the small boy.

"I know!" he nodded proudly. "I'm going to be just as cool when I'm big. You're going to train with me, right nii-san?"

Itachi laughed, and reached over with this left hand to lightly flick the young boy on the forehead. "I'll train with you sometime when you're a bit bigger, Sasuke."

Sasuke pouted for a bit, but quickly recovered and returned to wagging his metaphorical puppy dog tail.

* * *

1/17/18: I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter. I see that the number of reviews has passed 100! I'm writing an Interlude (from Fugaku Uchiha's perspective) as a reward, which will be posted as a bonus chapter. It doesn't fit in the story flow until a couple more chapters have passed, but rest assured it is coming.

I'll write another bonus Interlude when the story hits 300 reviews. I'll be back again with another regular chapter on February 3rd.


	13. Year 2, Month 6, Week 2, Part 2

I spent the rest of dinner trying to seem a bit more childish to make up for my too intelligent conversation with Itachi. Any adult ninja who'd been paying attention might have listened in, so I did my best to seem smart, but not _too_ smart, in the hopes that they'd figure it was a fluke, or a misunderstanding. Not the greatest insurance, but as a child I had very little opportunity to affect change, so even if it was a bit risky, I had to take my chances.

I interacted with all of the children around me, making sure to ask questions about them, and slip innocuous, genuine-sounding compliments in when I could. They might not remember exactly _why_ later, but seeming interested would make me seem interest _ing_ , and they'd hopefully find themselves liking me for no real reason. And it's easier to influence people who like you.

A few times, I was actually surprised to find myself enjoying the conversation. I'd asked Shino about bugs, and when he answered my original question with the clear belief that I would be disinterested in him within a few sentences, I asked him more leading questions. I had to suppress a smile when he started showing some childlike enthusiasm for his ant terrarium, and telling me all about how, "they build whole _villages_ in the ground!"

I wasn't really sure what to talk to Hinata about, especially because she was still so young, but I settled on discussion of Neji's turtle, a tried and true topic. It drew him back into the conversation as well.

Apparently, he had indeed been training it, though the results were just a few simple tricks as of yet. He proudly relayed that his father approved, and had praised him for his dedicated work.

Once the meal was finished, the adults rose from the table and began to mingle around the house, and it was "suggested" by a very firm Yoshino that we children go outside to play together. It was starting to get colder outside, but this was the land of fire, and as long as we stayed active, we didn't even need to bundle up to stay warm.

As always seemed to be the case when pre-Academy kids got together, someone suggested we "play ninja." There were multiple variations on the game, such as, "search-and-rescue ninja," which was kind of like capture the flag from my old world, or, "Kumo vs. Konoha," which was pretty self-explanatory. I wasn't quite enthusiastic about the idea, because while I'd dominate in such a game, it really wasn't that impressive to win against other toddlers.

Luckily, we somehow started a janken competition instead. Kids are easily distracted. I still had an unfair advantage, but at least I didn't have to deal with a bunch of kids flailing about or shouting out jutsu names and then arguing about the rules. Janken was the same as rock-paper-scissors back on my old world, and it could be cheated at if one was skilled enough. Most people start to move their hand into position before the downward swing is complete. If you wait till the last possible moment to form your own hand into rock, paper, or scissors, you can read your opponent's move and win every time. This is especially easy against children. Doubly so when you've got above age-level finger and hand dexterity from practicing the hand seals needed for future ninjutsu, as I did.

I ended up facing off against Itachi, once all of the others had been beaten out. His almost-black, Uchiha eyes tracked my hands, just as I tracked his. It was over almost as soon as it started. Three times, his fingers waited till the last moment, then flashed into the shape that would overpower my own shape, which I'd been forced to choose earlier than him, because I couldn't move either my fingers-or, apparently-my _brain_ as fast as he could.

I let out a huge sigh, but made the seal of reconciliation with a small smile and slight bow toward Itachi. "Well done, Uchiha-kun. Your fingers are very fast."

"Yours are as well, Nara-kun."

I grimaced toward the ground at his polite but meaningless compliment.

"I told you my brother was the coolest!" a little voice piped up from the sidelines.

Sasuke was standing off to the side, in between his mother and father, who had probably just arrived. He began to relay the story of the janken tournament to his father, but was quickly shut down.

"Sasuke. Behave with the dignity befitting our clan," his father ordered, even the cadence of his voice heavy with the knowledge of his own influence. It was an order that knew it would be obeyed.

Sasuke bit his lip, and shut up immediately. His eyes darted around to the other kids who'd looked his way, and he swallowed hard, then looked straight ahead into the middle distance with a pretty good attempt at a blank face.

His mother placed two fingers on his tiny shoulder, a light touch, but enough that his little jaw unclenched.

My own jaw was clenched in response, though. Perhaps, if I hadn't known more about Sasuke's childhood than I should have been able to, and I wasn't an adult in a child's body, I would have thought nothing more of it than that Sasuke's dad was strict, maybe even a little mean. But I did know more than I should have, and I also knew that the Uchiha leader's pride would lead, indirectly, to the attempted coup, and the destruction of his entire clan. And the ruination of both his sons' lives.

I met his fathers eyes, for a moment, staring into them without a smile or subservient expression on my face for just a little too long.

"You represent the Nara clan passably," he said.

The moment was broken, and I looked down, performing the bow I'd practiced. "It is an honor to pit my poor skills against those of your son and heir." It was a line, obviously, but it probably satisfied Fugaku Uchiha's sense of propriety and pride, because when I straightened, he was turning away, with a brief hand motion indicating his family should follow him.

Itachi leaned down and murmured, "From him, 'passably' means you did great," before catching up with his departing family.

I watched them go, and swallowed down a sour feeling. I walked away from the crowd of children, ignoring them. I pushed on my diaphragm to relieve the uncomfortable feeling there. I knew it wouldn't have made a difference, and maybe would have made things worse in the long run, both for me and the two boys, but I still felt ashamed that I didn't do something. I let out a deep breath, and acknowledged my own gratitude that I had guardians who were kind, even if they were too smart for my own good, and maybe a little suspicious of me.

Yoshino found me sitting by myself on the edge of the porch and picked me up. "You must be tired, little one," she murmured to me, probably interpreting my morose expression for crankiness. "Why don't we let you get some rest?" She carried me up to my room and laid me on my futon after taking off my outer clothes and boots.

"I'm not tired," I said, but before I could continue, I yawned loudly.

She raised an eyebrow and her lips twitched with a suppressed smile.

"Well, maybe a little," I mumbled. I considered mentioning that Sasuke's dad was mean to him, but realized that it wouldn't matter if I did. Being mean to your kids wasn't a crime. In fact, it probably wasn't that rare, among the prouder clans. Parents had expectations. "Sasuke said I could go play with him sometime. Itachi said it was okay, too," I lied. "Is it okay if I go?"

"Sure, baby," she said, her voice calm and soothing as she tucked the cover around me. "Now go to sleep." She pushed my loose hair back from my head and stroked the top of my head like a cat.

I scowled at her, even as my eyelids closed on their own. Was she doing some sort of jutsu to make me fall asleep faster? Unlikely. I would probably be able to feel foreign chakra affecting me like that, unless it was a really subtle genjutsu. "I'm not a baby," I grumbled.

* * *

"Okay, stop. I want you to rearrange the board so the pieces match their placement from the tenth move, when we started the match."

I lifted my eyes from the piece I'd just moved, up to Shikaku. We were sitting outside, playing shogi on the edge of the patio, so the slightly weaker autumn sun could shine on us. It had been a particularly silent match, with just the two of us, as Shika was occupied with Yoshino doing something or other, and Shikaku was no longer pausing as often to explain strategy to me. I myself had been preoccupied, thinking over how I could get Shikaku to agree that Itachi should train me. Or even that I should start taijutsu training at all. "What?" I said, squinting a him.

"I want you to turn back time in your mind, find the placement of the pieces as of the tenth move of this game, and set them to match it." He was leaning back, lounging lazily while he supported his torso on one arm, the other free to move pieces, but his eyes had that focused stare again. Pointed toward me.

I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "I...don't remember the placement." Was this some sort of metaphorical lesson he was trying to teach me, starting off with some sort of nonsensical request that I couldn't fulfill?

"I think you do." The words were a challenge and a command all at once.

My heart started to pound a little harder, though I wasn't exactly sure why I was afraid. Something here felt dangerous. Was Shikaku letting off just the barest hints of killing intent? I suddenly really, really wanted to be able to remember. "Um..." I murmured, almost inaudibly. The match was almost all the way over, with me losing as always. The layout was completely different than it had been at the beginning of the game. I stared down at the board, trying to remember how it had been laid out. It was hard, with the pieces sitting there, now, scrambling my memory. I closed my eyes, laying out the pieces from the very beginning in my imagination, as best I could, and then moving forward with the first five moves from each of us.

I opened my eyes, and with a sweep of my arm, cleared the board of pieces. Then, as quickly as I could, I began to replace them, as they had been on the tenth move. My hands were shaking.

I got most of the placements relatively easily, but there were some that I just couldn't remember. I pulled my hands back to my lap, and stared at the board for a minute. Definitely killing intent. Why? I let the unfairness of it, and that little hint of betrayal I felt that went beyond logic, bubble up and turn into anger. When it built enough, it mastered some of the fear, and I looked up to Shikaku, meeting his eyes again with a glare. "If I'd known there would be a test, I'd have paid more attention."

He raised his eyebrow a bit, and studied the board. "Some of these are wrong."

"So what are you going to do?" It was a challenge. I squeezed my fingers in my lap, and resisted the urge to flare my own chakra. It would help to displace his from my system, and counteract the effects of his killing intent, but it might also be noticeable, especially with us sitting so close together, and him being a jounin.

"I'm going to help you do it better," he said. He stared at me for a few seconds, almost as if confused by my glare, and then he released the killing intent. When I relaxed, he shifted a bit, drawing himself more upright. "You're quite sensitive to chakra. Even more so than Yoshino suggested." He said it in a conversational tone that made me want to throw the shogi board at him.

"Well, you were pointing your killing intent right at me," I said, still staring him down, my words enunciated and deliberate. "It was quite noticeable."

"Most children your age wouldn't have noticed. They would have felt some psychological pressure and been oblivious to its cause. It was very subtle." His gaze trailed off, and his tone changed so that it sounded like he was thinking aloud rather than speaking directly to me. "Really, the purpose was just to boost your ability to remember a little bit by simulating a very small crisis situation. But you noticed. And you were using anger as a counterbalance. Thinking about it, I'm not too surprised. You've encountered killing intent before. In more than one form."

I had encountered his killing intent, and Yoshino's. Was that what he meant? "It is not fun," I bit out.

He let out a put-upon sigh. "There's no point in continuing to be angry. You want to be a ninja, don't you? You will have to deal with killing intent from people who actually want to kill you all the time. Getting used to it from someone whose goal is to protect you and make you stronger will only give you an advantage."

Well, when he put it that way... I tightened my mouth, but looked away and pushed some of the anger away. "I do want to be a ninja," I said. Maybe I could use this situation as a lead in to the taijutsu training conversation.

"I can help you with that." He wasn't looking at me directly, his gaze pointing instead out and up toward the sky. But he was paying attention.

I was silent for a moment. That wasn't really the response I'd been expecting. Though I'm not sure what I _had_ been expecting. Resistance of some sort, I guess. "Well...good," I said. "I want to start now."

"We've already started," he parried.

 _"_ With the sensory training and the shurikenjutsu, yes," I said. "But I can do more. I want to learn other things, too."

"Why the hurry? You won't even start at the Academy for a few more years. There's plenty of time for you to learn everything."

"There will never be enough time for me to learn _everything_ ," I said with a small smile. "But even so, why wait?" It was the counter-question to his. A conversational parry, rather than an answer to his question.

He noticed, because his eyes moved over to me, though he didn't move the rest of his body, as if he couldn't be bothered to turn all the way toward me. "Because living a proper childhood is an important part of becoming a functional human being, able to withstand life as an adult."

"Starting to learn things a bit early doesn't stop me from having a proper childhood. Besides, who makes the rules about what a 'proper' childhood is? I think learning is fun. I also think playing with Shika is fun. And Neji and Itachi. I shouldn't have to be bored and not get to learn things just because some other kids aren't."

"When you show a certain kind of promise, Shiori, other people start to have expectations. Suddenly, the thing you're learning for fun are things they want you to put to other uses, maybe before you're ready."

I frowned. Oh...this made a little more sense. He didn't want me to be like Kakashi, or Itachi, a child soldier thrust into war too early, just because I was a prodigy. They were always a bit unstable afterward, because they hadn't been ready for those type of horrors, if a person ever really could be ready. In fact Shikaku probably knew a lot of people like that, judging the times he'd grown up in, when the village and nation were more volatile. It was easy to forget that Konoha was only a few generations old. Probably less than a hundred years old, though I didn't know the exact numbers. "Well...you won't let them, right?" I said brightly, slipping on the innocent, trusting expression that played so well with my toddler features. "If bad people try and make me do something, you'll stop them, right?"

He was silent for a while. "Well, yes," he said, just a bit awkwardly. "But you'll have to go along with what I say. Even if you're far ahead of the other kids, you're going to have to spend time doing the same things they are. I won't allow you to skip ahead just because you can." He turned to me, finally. "You'll start at the normal age, attend the Academy for the full length of time, and graduate with your classmates." He said it firmly, almost as if he expected me to protest.

"Okay?" I said.

"You'll probably be bored. There may be other people who tell you that you should be advancing faster, because of your talents. You will not be able to do so," he explained.

"Well, that's fine with me...as long as I don't have to pretend to be on their level!" I quickly added. "I mean, I don't mind waiting to graduate till I'm twelve. There are plenty of other things Academy students aren't learning that I can work on. It's just that I don't want to have to pretend I'm stupid all the time."

"Perhaps you should not agree so quickly. That's not all. You won't have to pretend to be average, though it might behoove you not to show off your skills too much, for your own benefit. I will also require other things of you. In addition to your attendance in the Academy, as a prodigy you will complete additional tasks for me and the good of the clan, regarding clan relations and politics." A little smile quirked at his mouth.

I frowned at him, not because I was upset by the stipulation, but because the way he said it made me think he was hiding something within the words. "What do you mean, clan relations and politics?"

He smiled a bit wider. "It is necessary that the Nara be seen as an integrated, functional part of the village. As both a member of my family and a prodigy, you must display good social and leadership skills."

I narrowed my eyes further, and waited for him to continue.

"I'll expect you to participate in various extracurricular activities with your peers and the rest of the village, some of which you will initiate and take a leadership role in. This will take time away from your training, occasionally. However, if you wish to start training early, and receive more advanced training when you are ready, you will agree to and follow my requirements."

It seemed like he was telling me about extra work I'd have to do, but really, he was telling me that I had to...make friends? Not only that, but that I would need to take a leadership role, and gain influence. Perhaps he wanted me to form bonds so I would have a support group. I'll admit, I hadn't been the most sociable kid. Apparently, he was concerned that I never wanted to play with the toddlers my own age.

To him, it probably seemed like this would be an irritant to me, with my antisocial tendencies. And it was, a bit. But it was also something that I'd already been planning on doing. I needed to gain influence in the village, if I was going to change anything. I couldn't do that simply by being a hermit who trained all the time, though being a prodigy _would_ probably help a lot, with the way this culture respected military strength. He was encouraging this, and would probably even help me facilitate it, since he thought it was his idea.

"Itachi has to do that, too," I said. "His dad wants him to make friends with people from other families. He told me when we were playing last night. Is that because he's a prodigy, like me?"

Shikaku didn't respond visibly. "Perhaps. It's good policy to facilitate clan relations, in any case."

"He told me his dad was interested in reaching out to us."

"Really?" he said, but his inflection made it sound more like, " _Iiinteresting_..."

"Yeah. Itachi might be helping to train someone, even though he's still in the Academy. He said something about it helping after chuunin promotions. But you know, he said that if I asked you, you might let me start taijutsu training. Did his dad talk to you about this whole clan relations thing? Itachi-kun said he might talk to you." I leaned forward just a bit. "If I can train with Itachi-kun, I guess it's okay." I hoped I wasn't laying it on too thick.

"Uchiha-san has not reached out to me."

"Oh," I said, deflating. "Well, I guess can do this whole clan relations thing if I get to train, but can't we wait till the kids around my age are a bit older before I have to do clan stuff with them? Right now...I mean, they're just so..." I trailed off. "I'd rather play with people who are smarter. Like Neji and Itachi-kun. And me and Shika."

"Shika and I," he corrected absently. He stared up at the clouds for a while, till I felt a bit fidgety.

Had he forgotten we were having a conversation? I stared down at the shogi board between us, willing him with my mind to let me train with Itachi.

"Perhaps company a little older than you would do you some good. Kids are so troublesome," he sighed.

I made a face at him.

He widened his eyes and looked shocked. "Oh, _you're_ a kid!"

I laughed, the mirth almost startling me as it bubbled up from deep in my belly.

When I calmed, he was smiling over at me. "You're pretty cute when you act like a kid."

I grinned. "Does that mean you're going to talk to Itachi-kun's dad so I can play with him? Umm, train, I mean?"

"I will. Just don't forget our agreement once you get what _you_ want out of this."

"What about Shika?" I asked. "Is he going to keep training with me, too? It only seems fair..." I trailed off innocently, and looked up under my lashes. "And if he gets to train with me, he should have to help out with this clan relations thing, too, right?"

Shikaku stared at me for a minute, and then leaned his head back and laughed. "Oh, so cunning, Shiori! You just don't want to have to do the extracurricular activities all by yourself. Don't think you can fool me."

I pursed my lips a little and looked away from him. A little display of childishness, precocious though I was, would help to alleviate any suspicions about _actual_ manipulation. "Well, it's more fun with Shika," I said.

" _If_ we can coordinate something between the Uchiha and our clan, your brother may decide for himself if he wishes to join you, once he is ready. In any case, this training won't be starting until you turn three, and the same for him. You'll also have to prove yourself capable of my own training before you're permitted to add more to your plate, and we're going to start working on more than we have been."

I perked up at that, not sure whether to be happy about the agreement that I could train in taijutsu, or upset that I couldn't start right away. "What more? What are you going to teach me?"

He pointed at the shogi board. "Your memory."

I frowned. "You're going to make me memorize the game moves?" I knew that wasn't exactly what he was alluding to, but I truly wasn't sure what he did mean.

"You remember things before you were born, Shiori."

I stared at him, wishing suddenly that I had not been quite so honest when he asked me.

"Judging from what I've observed, you're absorbing literally everything that happens around you, and to you. You remember how this board was set up. I'm going to train you to realize it, and use it."

What? I shook my head. "I mean, I do have a good memory. And I'm smart. But it's not like I remember _everything_." This must be an unfortunate side-effect of being an adult in a child's body. But instead of underestimating me due to my young age, he was _overestimating_ my intelligence, to account for my behavior. Probably. Unless this was some sort of weird mind-game, or test. I couldn't completely put it past him. His brain moved aeons behind his eyes, never quite showing on the surface.

"Ah," I said under my breath, an idea popping to mind. "Do _you_ remember everything?" It would explain his idea that I should, too.

"Not quite, Shiori. Not like you. My memory is trained. Yours is natural. Once yours is trained as well, it will be a formidable tool."

I opened and closed my mouth, unsure what to say. He would be disappointed, if he thought I was capable and it turned out I wasn't. Or maybe he would just think I wasn't trying very hard. But there was nothing I could do about that. And if his memory had been trained, maybe he could do the same for mine. It would be a wonderful tool, indeed. "I'll try," I said finally.

"Good. Now, from the beginning. I want you to lay this game out, and walk through it, play by play." The killing intent returned.

I resisted the urge to flinch, cleared the board of pieces, and then began to replace them.

* * *

2/4/18: Sorry about the late update, guy. FF is having some sort of server issue that wouldn't allow me to upload a new chapter yesterday. It's still happening today, but I found a workaround. Normally, the next chapter would come out on the 20th, but since there is a bonus interlude waiting to be posted, you'll get the next normal chapter on the 17th, and then the interlude on the 20th.


	14. Year 2, Month 7

The next few weeks were grueling. Shikaku was a busy man, and I'd thought he was a lazy one, but when he wasn't at work, he somehow found the time and energy to train me till I was too tired and frustrated to continue.

I wish I could say I was performing well. I wasn't. Shikaku somehow had this idea that I should be able to remember literally everything I experienced. If we walked through a room, he wanted me to know how many potted plants had been within it, and where they were placed. How many windows, doors, or other avenues that someone could enter. What color had the floor mat been? Did it have a pattern? What was the name of the first book on the third row of the shelf next to the far window?

I quickly gained a habit of restless, darting eyes, taking in everything around me, and doing my best to memorize it. I was more _aware_ of my surroundings than I'd ever been, in either life. But even so, I didn't have the recall he was looking for. Inevitably, he would come to a question that I couldn't answer. He never got angry, but he didn't seem pleased, either. I had the distinct impression that he thought I just wasn't trying very hard, or maybe that I was deliberately lying to him when I said I couldn't remember something.

 _His_ memory was perfect. Or if it wasn't, it gave a damn good illusion of being so. It seemed almost super-human. Was this a Nara trait? I knew the Sharingan was supposed to literally copy everything it saw, but as far as I knew, the Nara were nothing more than abnormally intelligent. And not even all of them, at that. There were smart and dumb Nara, just like any other selection of people.

Unfortunately for my ego, Shikamaru trained with us when he felt like it, and after a few days to get the hang of it, he beat me every time. It was a reminder that my little brother-err, cousin, that is-was a real genius. One day, the imbalance of experience between us would narrow, and he would leave me in the dust. If he applied himself.

It wouldn't have been such a big deal for me to fall behind Shikamaru in this, if Shikaku hadn't been so absolutely convinced that I should be doing better. It was worrying, because I couldn't keep up with what he expected, and he was going to realize that soon. And when he did, he was going to wonder about me. About why I'd so _stupidly_ admitted that I could remember being in the womb. And then, he might wonder about other thing, things I didn't want him scrutinizing too closely, like why I seemed more advanced than Shikamaru, even though I was barely older than him, and wasn't actually as smart.

The worry was exhausting. In addition to the training I was doing on my own, and the continued chakra sensory and shuriken training with Yoshino and Shikaku, the memory testing was wearing on me. I still even had the occasional calligraphy lesson with Yoshino, and I found myself almost completely without rest or downtime.

But I was still doing my best, because I knew that all of it would be useful later. There had to be a way for me to improve my memory. I knew that IQ wasn't static. The brain was malleable, and could be trained or stagnate, just like any other muscle. It's just that the way I was trying it wasn't working, at least not fast or well enough. It didn't help that I also seemed to have hit a wall with Yoshino's attempts to teach me to expand my chakra sensory range into something that would actually be useful.

When Shikaku wasn't around to train me, which was fairly often as he was the Jounen Commander, I did my normal practice, and tried to figure out my memory problem on my own. I had no luck with the latter.

At least physically, I was improving. Shikaku had carved more silhouettes into the bark of the trees around our training area, and I was trying to learn accuracy while moving. It was very, very hard. It made me appreciate how absolutely ridiculous all those action movies I'd seen back on earth were. Shooting a gun with any accuracy while running, jumping, or even driving, was probably a skill far beyond almost every living person on the Earth.

Shikaku was away at work during the time we normally trained shurikenjutsu, so Shika and I trained on our own, making a game of it as always.

"Okay, Shika. This is our last shot," I murmured between breaths, panting. We were both crouched on the ground about ten meters away from the area where the targets had been drawn.

"I've got left," he whispered back, a hand kept warily on his shuriken pouch. We'd been training for almost an hour already, and we were both almost out of shuriken, and almost out of energy.

"Then I've got right," I confirmed. "No time to waste, let's go!" I shot to my feet, pushing so hard I was half tilted forward as I sprinted toward our targets.

Shika was right beside me, arms and legs pumping like a professional sprinter, face drawn into a scowl of effort.

We ran through the clearing, throwing shuriken at the silhouettes carved into the trees as we went. My shuriken all at least hit the "bodies", but a couple of them bounced off the tree trunks instead of sinking in, and my aim was so abysmal I wouldn't have been much use against a real enemy. Still, at least this was something I was better than Shika in.

We slowed after exiting the target area, and turned to walk back and assess our performance. Shika looked from his side to mine and frowned at the difference. "Twoublesome," he muttered on a puff of air, and plopped onto the ground, breathing hard.

I couldn't feel too superior about it, since I not only had a few extra months to build hand-eye coordination, but a huge amount of extra practice in secret. And, of course, the whole adult-in-a-child's-body thing. But who was counting? I figured it was fair enough, since he was a genius. "Up, up," I demanded, reaching down and tugging at his arm.

With some reluctance, he rose, and after we picked up our shuriken we stretched to make sure we didn't pull any muscles-chakra could do the same job, but we weren't supposed to be able to use ours yet-and laid out in the backyard to relax. Cloud-watching.

"I'm so tiwed," Shikamaru said. "Twaining is hard."

"Me, too," I replied simply. But as we lay there in exhausted stillness, my mind started spinning, caught on his words. Wasn't there something I'd heard or read about shinobi using chakra as a booster, to stay awake and keep their performance level high when on long missions without sleep? Obviously, it could also be used as a physical booster, useful for jutsus such as the shunshin, which was extremely high-speed movement. It helped shinobi heal quicker naturally, and stopped us from getting sick from most attacking organisms or viruses.

I sat up.

Shikamaru looked toward me, his expression questioning.

I shook my head at him and stood, pacing in silence. No time to talk, I was having a minor epiphany.

I sat abruptly back down, crossing my legs and closing my eyes. I reached inward, to that still-strange sense of chakra. It was swirling within, the little chakra centers creating energy at a sedate pace. The chakra pooled in my stomach, with smaller amounts running through my body via a system that ran vaguely parallel to my vascular system. As before, the spiritual yin chakra far overwhelmed the physical yang chakra, and where it mixed together it turned yellow. I looked closer, watching as it mixed together, and saw that there seemed to be more yin chakra going into the yellow mix than yang. Which made sense, since I had way more of it to work with. But did it also mean the chakra I was using for jutsu and practice was unbalanced, leaning more toward yin than yang? Was that a bad thing?

I was about to reach for it eagerly, and only stopped myself at the last minute. Before trying potentially dangerous chakra experiments, I should probably take some time to think over what I was doing.

I'd heard a few horror stories from Shikaku about ninja flooding their system with too much chakra, in the wrong way. One genin had been trying to learn the shunshin without supervision, and broken his own knee, _backward_ , from putting too much force into his first step. People went blind from trying to augment their eyesight and flooding the extremely delicate chakra channels till they burst and ruined the small organs.

I also knew there was a difference in yin vs yang chakra, but this was where things quickly got hazy. Yin chakra was of the mind or the spiritual, and yang of the body or the physical. You mixed them together, and then used the full chakra that resulted for jutsu. But I was pretty sure it wasn't _quite_ as simple as that. I believed I'd heard somewhere that genjutsu used primarily yin chakra. Which meant that the ratios between yin and yang mattered. It was the basis of my potential epiphany.

None of the scrolls or books I'd stolen had any advanced information about chakra, as far as I could tell from my study so far. And I couldn't just go asking around about it. So, maybe, some simultaneously reckless-because I was doing it in the first place-and extremely careful experimentation would help me figure it out for myself.

I laid back again and thought about the safest ways to do said experimentation. I needed a method that would allow me to test my different ideas and get credible results. I grinned to myself.

* * *

The next day, when Shikaku was at work, and Yoshino had gone to the store with Shika, I finally had a chance to experiment. It had been difficult to sleep because of how caught up I was in my idea. I'd already gone outside to "play" and completely exhausted myself physically so I'd have a good basis for testing. After making sure I was alone and secure in my room, I sat down on my futon and reached inside myself for the chakra in my stomach.

I took some of the mixed chakra, and _gently_ pushed it through my chakra system, letting a little out though the tenketsu in my left forearm, so that it filtered through my muscles. A very little bit. It felt a little funny, and I moved the muscle experimentally, then used both arms to gently squeeze down on the material of the stuffed animal whose insides I hid things in. I squeezed harder, and harder, and the muscles in my left forearm seemed to eat the chakra, fueling them to squeeze harder than I could with my right.

The chakra ran out pretty quickly, and my grip strength returned to normal when it did. I examined my left forearm, but couldn't find much different about it than before I'd funneled chakra through it. It was still a bit sore from my workout, actually.

Next, I reached back to the pool of chakra within me, and instead of calling on the yellow, mixed chakra of yin and yang, I reached for the green of unmixed yin chakra. It resisted my pull. I tugged a little harder, but instead of moving as I wished, it seemed almost magnetized toward the mixing pool of yellow, and tried to slip that way instead.

I stopped for a minute to try and figure out what the problem was. Maybe I couldn't use straight yin or yang chakra? I took a tiny bit of yin chakra, and pulled it toward the middle, doing the same with an even tinier bit of yang chakra. I kept them separate from the rest of the mixing chakra as best I could, though some of it seeped in. It was surprisingly difficult to keep it from just mixing all together with the rest of the combined chakra as it wished, but I mostly succeeded in keeping it separate. It made a really green colored mix, but once it had that little bit of yang, I was able to pull it out and send it through my chakra system. It felt... _cooler_ than normal, though it wasn't actually a temperature sensation. Kind of like mint?

When it seeped into my muscles, I tried the squeezing trick again. This time, it seemed like my strength gave out quicker, as if the chakra mix was faster-burning fuel.

I resisted the urge to smile, as it could just be the placebo effect. I repeated the experiment with normal chakra, and then mostly yin chakra, making the amounts as similar as possible, and counting off the seconds of increased strength. Yin chakra burned faster, again. I allowed myself to smile, then.

Next, I did the same thing, but with mostly physical yang chakra, which came out dark orange, and felt warm, like pepper. I squeezed really, really hard, and it lasted a few seconds longer. I couldn't contain my glee, and had to hop up and bounce frantically around my room while laughing before the giddy feeling subsided. Once I was able, I returned to my spot atop my futon.

I repeated the test a few times, just to make sure. Yang chakra made me stronger, and lasted longer.

Which lead to the obvious conclusion. Yin chakra might make me smarter. It might, in fact, allow me to augment my memory over short periods of time.

But there was a problem. I was afraid to channel chakra to my brain. I could sense the chakra system there, and it was incredibly delicate. Even more so than the parts that fed the eyes. If I pushed more chakra through them, they might not be able to withstand it, and I would give myself brain damage.

My chakra control wasn't good enough that I felt safe trying the equivalent of self brain surgery.

I sighed deeply, but wasn't disappointed for long before I realized that even if I couldn't yet channel yin chakra to my brain, I'd still learned something momentous about chakra in general. Something that I could probably use right away, in fact.

I stared down at the futon below me, and very slowly ran my fingers through the seals for kakuremino, the cloak of invisibility jutsu. Mixed chakra tried to pull up, but I willed more yin chakra out instead, till it was a greeny-yellow chakra that moved up through my chakra system and out through the tenketsu of my hands. Still concentrating, I laid them on the fabric of the futon below me.

Illusion spread out from my hands like a fast-motion ink spill, covering the whole futon, a larger area than I'd expected to be affected with the relatively small amount of chakra I was using.

Before, when I had imagined fathomless, empty blackness, the fabric had turned black, but not turned into the image of a black hole. It still wasn't perfect. But for a second, my heart beat faster, as my irrational brain was convinced I was suspended above a chasm of blackness, like standing on a pane of glass. I held the illusion for a few more seconds, then withdrew my hands, and did another round of frantic, giddy leaping around my room.

I tired out quickly enough that I was reminded of my original purpose. Could I use chakra to decrease my recovery time?

I thought for a second, and then realized that I really had no idea what I was doing. What I was trying to do amounted to healing myself with chakra, which I didn't know even the first thing about. After a few minutes, I decided to just try cycling extra chakra through my body at a slow, constant rate. My body already knew how to heal things, just like the muscles knew how to contract. If it had the extra chakra, maybe it would just naturally use it to do what it was already doing, just a bit better.

Once I started that, I returned to my cloak of invisibility jutsu practice, which came with surprising difficulty. Turns out, it's not easy to do two different things at once with your chakra. Flushing small amounts of chakra through my system and doing a jutsu that required concentration was like rubbing my belly and patting my head at the same time. Except way harder. But I got the hang of it anyway.

* * *

2/17/18: This is the last chapter before the bonus Interlude, which is a thank-you for everyone who helped get this story to 100 reviews. It'll be posted on 2/20. The next few chapters are lead-in to the next arc, where Shiori is going to start attempting real change to the timeline. I'm excited for Shiori to expand her world and sphere of influence a little! As always, feel free to talk to me about what you liked, didn't like, and what you think might be coming for Shiori.


	15. Interlude--Fugaku

Uchiha Fugaku did not find himself surprised often. When he'd been called to the Jounin Commander's office at the end of his shift, he assumed that he was going to get another assignment for the Konoha Police Force. It wouldn't be the first time he was forced to work long days with little extra appreciation. As the leader of the Uchiha clan, he should have been afforded the respect to handle missions of actual importance. If he had one more civilian come to into the station about some trivial idiocy like their lost cat and expect his troops to "handle it," he was going to set them on fire with an extremely satisfying katon jutsu. He could only hope that speaking with the Jounin Commander directly meant the assignment would at least be _interesting_.

He entered the office after a polite knock, and gave Nara Shikaku a shallow bow.

The Jounin Commander appeared to have been daydreaming, because he tilted forward in his ridiculous swiveling, leaning chair-that Fugaku was sure only existed to amuse him when he wanted to take naps or twirl around in circles instead of work. "Uchiha-san, thank you for coming. Please, have a seat," he said.

Fugaku sat in front of the desk, at the much less comfortable chair facing his superior. Was the difference in comfort between his seating and the other man's a power play? Irritating. In any case, he would have preferred more traditional accommodations. If _he_ were the Jounin Commander, they would be kneeling before a tea table the proper way. Not that he would ever be considered for the position, despite his qualifications. He allowed himself a tiny grimace to show the other man his impatience, and said, "Nara-san, what is the purpose of this meeting?"

The other man stared at him silently for a beat too long before replying. "A small matter. I would like to discuss the possible cooperation between our clans in regards to my adopted daughter, and her training."

Fugaku didn't allow his surprise to show visibly. Instead, he nodded silently, as if it was a normal thing for the Jounin Commander to come to the Uchiha to request they pass on their expertise. Not that people didn't covet what they knew, or weren't jealous of what the Uchiha could do. But lately things had been tense, and they'd had less and less opportunity to gain any actual _influence_ in the village. Danzo, that poisonous weasel of a man, was trying to nibble away at their authority, and pollute any trust people had for his clan members, as long as they continued to refuse his traitorous demands. "She is...advanced for her age," he hazarded. He thought he'd heard something about that. It was a safe guess, with her being a member of Shikaku's family, even if not directly.

"Indeed. As is your own son. I hear rumors he will be graduating the Academy soon, despite his age."

"I believe it is a strong possibility," Fugaku said, not bothering to completely hide his smirk of pride. "My eldest son has already jumped ahead of his original classmates multiple times."

The Jounin Commander nodded. "He is a credit to your clan, Uchiha-san." Then the other man just stared at him from his idiotic swiveling chair, as if waiting for him to say something obvious.

Fugaku felt a muscle on his temple twitch in irritation, and willed it to calm. This meeting was definitely a power play of some sort, he was sure of it now. Luckily, he was a master of the subtle manipulation. Shikaku was an intelligent man, but he wouldn't best Fugaku, even with his cryptic comments and too-long stares to try and make him uncomfortable. "It is no surprise. The Uchiha cultivate talent such as his, and I am sure he will rise far and bring esteem to all who share his name."

Perhaps, his son would be Hokage, even if he himself could never be. If he could secure a more influential spot for the Uchiha as a whole. A connection with the adopted daughter of the Jounin Commander was an opportunity he couldn't pass up. He just had to be careful not to step into any traps Nara might be setting. "We could similarly cultivate the talent your adopted daughter has," he stated boldly, watching carefully for the other man's reaction.

Nara nodded, seemingly unsurprised. "She is driven, to say the least. I would speculate that she will be a force of nature to match your son, when they are older."

Fugaku's eyes widened minutely before he could stop them. 'To _match_ his son?' Was this meeting...the tentative overtures for arranging a marriage between their two clans, couched in a conversation about training? It would be just like the Nara in front of him, slippery and maneuvering as the man was. But Fugaku was well versed in looking underneath the underneath, enough to notice such things. Still, his thoughts stuttered for a moment in surprise, though after he thought about it for a moment, a marriage between his son and that particular member of the Nara wasn't a completely ludicrous idea.

However, Itachi was both a prodigy and the heir to the clan, and he was young yet. Fugaku didn't want to agree to anything so early. Another, more favorable, opportunity might appear as time passed. That didn't mean he would discount a potential source of influence with the Nara clan, and thus, the entire village. "It might be beneficial, to match one genius with another." An innocuous enough statement, and the move was back on Nara's side of the board.

"Yes, that was my idea on the matter. And my daughter's, I think. She's expressed interest in both your son and Neji, of the branch Hyuuga clan, due to their ability to match her intellect."

Fugaku sniffed. "I assure you, the Hyuuga boy cannot compare to my son's skill, nor his social graces." Was Nara trying to pressure him, with the threat that the Uchiha's biggest rival would pair with the girl instead, further pushing out the Uchiha? And how uncouth, to take marriage suggestions from your ridiculously young child. He held back another sniff of disapproval.

Nara looked like he was about to roll his eyes. "Well, the Hyuuga boy is young yet. Certainly not well trained enough to pass anything on to my daughter. Do you think your son is competent enough to teach a pre-Academy child, specifically in taijutsu? I know the Uchiha style is proprietary, but perhaps in Konoha-standard?"

Ah, so they were back to the surface layer, then. "It is somewhat unconventional, but there is no doubt my son would do an exemplary job, despite his age."

The Jounin Commander leaned back in his chair, as if he were almost completely uninvested in the conversation, while Fugaku found himself stiff with tension. "Well, I don't want to begin Shiori's training until she turns three. If your son can graduate the Academy around that same time, I would like him to begin her rudimentary training. It would be a nice addition to his book of accomplishments, for future promotions, if you are amenable."

"My son will be graduating the Academy this year," Fugaku stated firmly. He couldn't allow otherwise, now, or it would seem like Itachi didn't have the skill to be worthy of the adopted Nara, who wasn't even in line to lead her clan. Damn Nara Shikaku and his manipulativeness.

"Well, I'm not sure what Itachi's schedule will be like as a genin, but I was hoping to have her train two or three times a week, for about an hour."

"Only two or three hours a week?" He himself had made sure Itachi trained two to three hours per _day_ , at the age of three.

"Shiori is a quick learner, and very self-motivated. I'm sure it will be enough." The Jounin Commander grimaced at some unspoken thought. "Besides, I wouldn't want the time requirements to be too much of a burden on your son."

And there was the veiled insult. Insinuating that his son was overwhelmed and strapped for enough free time to properly train a toddler. It always came, even in situations like this, whether they were asking a boon, or trying to initiate an alliance of some sort. The Uchiha were not respected properly. It angered him, but he straightened his spine even further, and merely nodded. "I will contact you when my son graduates, Nara-san."

The Jounin Commander dismissed him with a lazy wave of his hand, and Fugaku stalked out. As he walked home, the anger left him in favor of speculation over his son's future. Even if the possibility of marriage with the Nara whelp didn't come to fruit, a teacher-student relationship would give his son leverage with someone who would no doubt gain power in the village when they were older.

Uchiha Fugaku did not find himself surprised often, and he couldn't help but smile that it had been pleasant business, after all. Despite how irritating he found Nara Shikaku.

* * *

2/22/18: Fugaku thinks with the Japanese naming convention, last names first, if you were confused. This is a bonus chapter to thank those who got this story to 100 reviews. (Sorry it's a bit late, I meant to post it a couple days ago.) The next bonus interlude will be for 300 reviews. We're already almost halfway there, so thank you! The next normal chapter will be posted on 3/9.


	16. Year 2, Month 8

I didn't stick with my resolution to avoid augmenting my mental facilities with yin chakra for very long. Shikaku's scrutiny quickly became unbearable, and I became paranoid to the point of losing sleep. If I couldn't prove his ridiculous theory that I had some sort of photographic memory to be correct, what would be his next conclusion? I couldn't think of anything more innocent that he might come up with. If I were him, the next thing I might wonder about is Orochimaru planting a child-like spy in Konoha, seemingly innocent, but just a little too "advanced" to be realistic.

During the night when I was supposed to be sleeping, I instead found my mind running through plans to keep Shikaku from suspecting me. At first I tried to calm down and stop that line of thinking. Then I realized that I really did need a plan, and I threw myself into it full-heartedly.

Instead of acting like I really couldn't remember, the next few times Shikaku quizzed me on something that I had no idea about, I answered first-and truthfully-that I didn't know, and when he pushed, I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously and refused to answer.

He, of course, grew even more suspicious in turn.

In the meantime, I worked even more frantically to improve my memory, to the point of letting my other training slide. I started using mnemonics that I hoped would help me trick my mind into remembering the type of seemingly useless facts that Shikaku expected me to absorb, like how many windows there were along a stretch of road, the number of shinobi, separated from the women, children, and civilian men, what a woman in a blue dress said to the turnip-vendor when we passed his stall. Things like that. Unfortunately, my efforts did not yield the necessary results.

One night, the worry became a little too much for me. My goal had to be keeping Shikaku from coming to a more damaging conclusion. But I didn't have the memory he was expecting, and I couldn't tell him the truth. There is absolutely no way telling the truth would work out well for me, not if anyone in power decided to weigh the best interest of a fake child against the best interest of the village. With the type of knowledge and advantage I could give the village, I'd be thrown to Torture and Interrogation, and maybe once they were _certain_ they'd exhausted every bit of knowledge I had, I'd be picked up by Root or ANBU, to make the best of my more advanced abilities. Or maybe they'd decide they couldn't trust me because I was obviously lacking the necessary blind loyalty toward the village they attempted to instill into all shinobi, and they would kill me so that I didn't pose a security risk.

I shook my head, changing my line of thought. Terrifying myself wasn't the best use of my energy right now. No. I needed to give Shikaku a reasonable explanation for my strangeness. The easiest way would of course be to...prove him right. I looked up from my knees, staring at the beam of light coming in through my window. I'd considered a possible solution to my memory problem before. I'd also dismissed it because of the danger. But my current situation was fraught with enough danger I wasn't sure that my original idea could be much worse.

I'd gotten a little better with chakra control in the last month. Maybe I would be safe. Ninjas channeled chakra to their eyes and other delicate places all the time, right? Of course, they were much more experienced than me, and probably had guidance through how to do it without hurting themselves. But still. It could be done. And I couldn't think of an alternative, so there wasn't much point to worrying about how badly I could hurt myself.

My experiment with swirling extra chakra through my system in the hopes it would help me heal faster were inconclusive. I was pretty sure Naruto did something similar, perhaps unintentionally, so I thought it should work. But I didn't feel safe activating large amounts of chakra around the family, and since I wasn't Naruto, I also didn't have large amounts of chakra to spare when I needed to be practicing jutsu and control exercises.

Hopefully, if I damaged my brain pushing chakra through it, Shikaku or Yoshino would take me to the hospital, and the medics there would be able to work some sort of chakra magic and heal me.

I snorted at the ridiculousness of that thought. Tsunade wasn't in the village right now, and even she probably couldn't do much for burst chakra channels in the brain. So I'd just have to be very careful not to damage them.

I wrapped myself in the cover of my futon, pressing against the wall in a little cocoon. I knew it didn't actually protect me, but it made me feel safer, and helped center me. Still, it was a while before I felt calm enough to attempt any chakra manipulation.

I reached inside myself for that swirling mix of energy, and separated out a small amount of the purest yin chakra I could create. I messed up the first time, too much yang slipping in, and I had to try again. I guided that tiny bit of chakra up from my stomach into my neck, and from there through the rapidly branching channels in the base of my skull. I didn't attempt to push chakra directly through the tiny capillary-like pathways, instead just letting it filter through them on its own.

The tiny amount of chakra didn't do much, except make the back of my head tingle with a minty feeling. I waited for the chakra to disburse throughout my brain, diminishing as it went, filtering into the tissues. I felt...very awake. It was strange, as if I was suddenly more aware of the sensation of the blanket against my skin, the smell of the fabric covering my knees, and the small amount of light filtering through my closed lids. I could taste the remnants of breakfast in the grooves between my teeth. It was nasty. I obviously needed to brush.

The mini-rush wore off after an unknown amount of time. I peeked my head out of the futon blanket, and looked around my room, a little disoriented. I blinked a few times. A little strange, sure, but I wasn't in pain, and as far as I could tell none of my chakra pathways had been damaged. Now, to see if the chakra actually affected me the way I had speculated. Experiments were necessary. I would do the 'control' test first, without chakra.

I crawled out of my cocoon and grabbed a book down from my shelf, then wrapped myself up again with the book open before me. It was a book about deer, and I'd read it before, but I hadn't even come close to memorizing it. I opened it to a random page, and skimmed over the text. After about thirty seconds, I closed the book again, and started to recite the page from top to bottom at a whisper. I fumbled after a couple sentences, and more often as the paragraph continued, till I found I could recall only the general ideas and a couple of the more interesting turns of phrase by the end of the page. I was pretty pleased with that performance, actually.

Similar to my previous experiments with my muscles and yang chakra, I repeated the experiment after carefully channeling yin chakra to my brain, and letting it seep through at its own speed, till it had spread throughout my cranial cavity. I opened the book to a different page. The experience of reading it was quite different. I couldn't help but notice the way some of the letters were bleeding at the edge. I read the words, my eyes speeding over the page, but I was also noting the juxtaposition of black on white, the fiber of the paper, and the fact that down below, Shikaku was now playing shogi with Shikamaru, while Yoshino's presence was still vaguely puttering somewhere around the kitchen.

Re-reading the random page made me remember that I'd been sitting in the window the first time I'd ever opened the book, and had seen an actual deer on the edge of the Nara forest. Then I'd wondered if Shikaku had the Deer contract, and if perhaps I might ever get a chance to sign it. That had led to me imagining riding a deer into battle instead of a horse.

The chakra wore off quickly, only lasting a little longer than the thirty seconds I took to scan the page. My brain stopped the strange maneuver of being both extremely focused and ridiculously distracted. And when I opened my eyes and began to recite the page from top to bottom, it was easier. Not perfect, definitely. But I remembered at least twice as much of the exact wording as I had the previous time.

Curiosity sparked in my mind, and I carefully fed my brain another pinch of yin chakra, but instead of trying to memorize another page, I just did my best to remember what I'd just read again. Astoundingly, though more time had passed by that point, my recall actually _improved_. The memory of the text was attached to my associated memories of both times reading it, along with a couple other associations my brain offered up unbidden.

I let out a shuddering breath when the chakra boost wore off, and let my forehead fall to my knees again. "Thank goodness," I muttered into my legs. If that hadn't worked, I would have been screwed.

* * *

The next time Shikaku decided to do "memory training" with Shika and me, I decided it was time to implement my plan. Hopefully, being proactive would mitigate the chance of failure. I'd already waited long enough. Who knew what type of ideas Shikaku was coming up with to explain my behavior?

My agitation was obvious and genuine, and Shikaku picked up on it immediately. "You don't look very relaxed, Shiori-chan. Is there something wrong?"

I shook my head. "No." I clenched my fingers together, and relaxed them again. "Are we going to do the test now?"

His frown grew bigger. "Do you not want to do the test?"

I hesitated, narrowing my eyes at him a little. "I have to do the memory tests if I want to do the taijutsu training, right?"

"Shiori...why do you think we're doing this?" he said, his words slow and almost hesitant.

"Ninjas have to be able to remember things. A lot of things," I responded simply.

"Well, that's true. But why do you think I expect you to know what the man in the red jacket who stood next to us when we were buying flour said to the stall owner?"

I clenched my fists again. "Did my mom tell you the secret?" I asked, glaring at him.

His eyebrows twitched upward a bit in what might have been muted surprise. "What secret?"

I continued to glare at him. "I don't remember what the man in the red jacket said. How am I supposed to remember that? Does Shika even remember?" I said instead of answering.

The boy in question looked between his father and me, frowning. "It's okay, Shiowi. I don't know what the man said. Don't be upset."

Instead of responding to me right away, Shikaku told Shikamaru to go help Yoshino in the kitchen. The much taller man led me in ominous silence back to the rocks in the backyard which we'd sat by for our last difficult conversation. He sat down with his back against his, gesturing for me to do the same.

It was cold, and I shivered for a moment through my jacket as the stone leached warmth from my back. I looked at my feet, hoping this conversation went as well as the last one had.

"Shiori, you know you can be honest with me, right?" he said.

"I don't remember," I said again, glaring at him. "I don't know why you think I do."

"Then how do you remember being inside your mother's womb?" Those black eyes of his bored into me, unflinching. "If you don't have a memory like a steel trap, how is it that you are so incredibly advanced for your age? I'm not talking about intelligence. Shikamaru is intelligent. I'm talking about the way I heard you snort the other day when Chouza made a sex joke, while all the other kids were oblivious. I'm talking about the way I heard you tell Shikamaru that only S-rank ninja have any real ability to say 'no' to the Hokage. I'm talking about the way you asked Yoshino if the reason why we don't use things like cameras more widely is because we're paranoid our village secrets might be more easily exposed, if everyone had access. If your mind is accepting and processing literally everything you've ever experienced, it's at least explainable. How else could you be possible?"

I paled, literally. I could feel the blood leaving my face, and if I wasn't already sitting down, I might have gotten dizzy. I hadn't even realized how much I'd been slipping. Which was unacceptable behavior on my part, because I lived with two intelligent shinobi, who were trained to be observant and suspicious.

"Are you okay, Shiori?" his voice was gentle, in contrast to its earlier tone. "You know you can talk to me, right? You're safe here, and we're your family."

And just like that, I calmed. Maybe I was overreacting. Just a little bit. Or maybe he was manipulating me through false kindness. But since the alternative left me helpless, I would act under the assumption that at least for now, he was still on my side. But I needed to make sure it stayed that way. I took a deep breath, and reminded myself that I'd planned for this. Well, maybe not exactly this, but I did have a plan. I'd practiced this lie enough that I should be able to carry it out naturally. "I made a promise with my okaa-chan that I wouldn't ever tell anyone," I said. "Nobody, not even you. I wanted to do what you asked, but..." I took a deep breath, and let it out again slowly, focusing on the tips of my feet. "My okaa-chan made me promise...and she's not here any more for me to make new promises with."

He brought his fingers together, pressing them against each other as if to stop them from acting on their own. "Your okaa-san told you to keep your extraordinary memory a secret?"

I nodded. "She said I could never ever tell anyone, and I should pretend it never happened. I wasn't supposed to tell my friends, and I wasn't even supposed to talk about it out loud. She never said I could talk about it with you." The last part was a whisper, and I looked down to my feet. "So you have to keep it a secret, too, alright?" I looked up, widening my eyes a little bit in silent appeal.

He didn't answer right away. "I generally trusted your mother's judgement. If she had a good reason for you to conceal your talent, I will abide by it. But I will not just blindly limit my ability to help you."

I frowned. That wasn't exactly what I'd been hoping for, but it would have to do. It could have been worse. "Okay, I guess," I muttered. Then with a deep breath, I jumped into the heart of the lie I'd come up with. "Okaa-chan said I was special, from all the way back when I was still inside her belly. She said it was a good thing, and I shouldn't feel sad or lonely that I wasn't like everybody else. But I have to keep it a secret anyway, because there are bad people out there. There's a bad man who would want to take me away and make me do bad things if he knew about me. Like you said a while ago, remember? She and Otou-san were going to help keep me safe like you said you would, but...they died. The bad man has watchers and he takes kids away in secret."

Shikaku's frown deepened as he listened to my explanation. "Shiori...this sounds like a monster story. Sometimes parents say things that aren't exactly true to make sure their kids stay safe, and don't do things that could get them in trouble." He said it gently, as if trying not to deliver the blow too harshly.

"No!" I said, shaking my head. "The bad man is real. I know he is. My okaa-chan didn't lie to me about him."

"Did she tell you his name?"

"No... but he is real." Whether Shikaku believed me on that point or not didn't matter as much as him believing that I believed it. And actually, I did. Danzo was a bad man if there ever was one, and he really did go stealing kids and forcing them to do horrible things. "You can't tell anyone. I can be smart, but I can't be special. Or he'll find out and want to steal me."

His eyes narrowed. "Special?" he repeated. "Did your okaa-san tell you what she meant by that?"

"My brain works really good, sometimes," I said, tilting my head to the side in confusion. I'd thought that was clear, so he must mean something else.

"Really _well_ ," he corrected absentmindedly. "Have you ever heard about kekkei genkai, Shiori?"

"Yeah!" I nodded. "That's what Neji and Itachi-kun have, right?" I frowned, acting as if I'd just realized why he'd asked the question. "Wait. Do you think I have weird eyes too?" I frowned harder, and crossed them inward, as if trying to see them inside my own head.

He let out a snort of laughter. "No. Not all kekkei genkai are manifested through the eyes, Shiori. Though I've never heard of a bloodline limit that affects cognition like what you have, it's not unprecedented. The Uchiha Sharingan does allow for perfect recall while activated." He went silent for a moment, still staring at me.

I did my best not to fidget under the scrutiny those dark, calculating eyes. I realized once again why this seemingly lazy and nonchalant man was the jounin commander. Somehow, he made it easy to forget it.

"During our lessons, you seemed to be trying very hard to remember. If I didn't know what you were capable of, you would have seemed like a very intelligent child with a memory beyond your age, but not on the level of a bloodline limit." He asked no question, waiting for me to elaborate on my own.

"I was trying to do it the normal way. My brain doesn't always work fast, you know. It gets tired sometimes. Or sometimes it doesn't work if I'm too..." I scrunched up my fists and made a face like I was constipated to explain the feeling, "like that, you know?"

When his mouth quirked and he nodded, I relaxed both physically, and a little mentally.

"I wanted to do it normally, because I'm not supposed to let anyone know the secret. And Shika can do it normally, though not like me when my brain is working hard. Unless...is he keeping it a secret, too?"

"No, he is not."

I nodded, bit my lip, and looked down at my toes again. "I'm sorry for lying to you, Shikaku-oji," I whispered. "Are you mad?"

He took a deep breath and let it out again, seeming to deflate a little. That calculating sense of cold metal in his eyes hid itself away again. "No, Shiori, I'm not mad. I'm also not happy that you felt you needed to keep this secret from me. But I do understand. However, going forward you are not to limit yourself to 'normality.' I will expect your best effort, and I expect to see dramatic improvement. We're still going to keep it a secret, though when you're older I expect that you'll tell the people who need to know, like your jounin team leader. And the Hokage."

I nodded once more and said, "Okay," in a small voice, taking a peek up at him from under my lashes.

My cuteness attack must have worked, because he rose to his feet and reached a hand down to lift me up. Instead of stopping when I reached my feet, he lifted me all the way up above his head, laughed at my squeal of surprise, and settled me so I straddled his neck, riding atop his shoulders. "I've got you, Shiori," he said simply.

I didn't say anything, instead just grabbing onto the spiky mop of a ponytail that passed for his hair, and wrapping my legs more firmly around his neck. It was nice, to see the world from up so high.

"By the way," he said. "I've talked to Fugaku Uchiha about your taijutsu training. If Itachi graduates this year, you might be able to start training with him around your birthday."

"You already talked to him? I thought you were going to wait to see if I did well at your memory training. And...I haven't been."

"I talked to him shortly after you asked me to, Shiori. These things take time, you know. Besides, you still won't get to start taijutsu if you don't improve in our current lessons. This is just some extra incentive." He squeezed my knees to make sure I was stable, and then ran toward the house. It wasn't quite a shunshin, but it was faster than a normal sprint.

I screamed in delight and held on for dear life.

* * *

3/9/18: I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I'd love to hear from you in the reviews. The next chapter will be released after a break, tentatively April 12th. I have more written, but I've realized the timeline of event might need to change slightly, which means I need to write an intervening chapter or two before I can continue.

I'm coming to the end of my pre-written chapters, but I'm almost finished with the first draft of my third novel in the Seeds of Chaos series, "Gods of Myth and Midnight," so I plan to write more for this story while I'm revising that novel. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to write full time now, so if any of you have bought or read my published novels, I want to send out a "thank you."


	17. Year 3

I turned three to little fanfare. Yoshino measured me up against the wall, and I'd grown to one hundred and two centimeters, which is about three feet and four inches, in the measurement I still tended to think in. I was tall for my age, especially for a girl, and I wondered in passing if my abnormal chakra had anything to do with it. But my body's parents had both been tall, and no one seemed to consider it out of the ordinary, so I didn't say anything.

For my birthday, we all sat down in the living room, and my three family members presented me with a single big box.

When I removed the wrapping, I stopped and squinted at the glaringly pink outside. The words 'Princess Tea Party' shone back at me. In glitter. I looked up at the three of them and smiled. "Oh, thank you, guys. How fun!" I tried to make myself sound sincere. I really did.

They all stared back at me seriously, and then Shika started giggling.

He clapped his hands over his mouth, but it was too late, he'd already started a chain reaction.

Yoshino and Shikaku burst out laughing as well, so hard that Shikaku slid out of his chair, and Yoshino had to help him back into it, because he was too weak from laughter to carry his own weight.

"It's a pwank!" Shikamaru announced gleefully. "It was my idea!"

"You should have seen your face," Yoshino gasped, wiping tears away. "I think you actually turned a little green!"

I opened up the box to find blank journals, calligraphy materials, more practice shuriken and kunai, and a little note.

"We're so happy to have you as part of our family. Happy birthday.

P.S. - Taijutsu training at 4 o'clock on Thursday, at the Uchiha compound."

Shikaku smirked at me. "We know you a little better than _that_ ," he said, pointing at the pink box.

I couldn't keep the ecstatic grin off my face, and gave each of them a hug, making sure to squeeze Shika extra hard as punishment for his prank, till he flailed to get away. Secretly, though, I hoped that they didn't know me nearly as well as they thought they did.

Later, Shikaku took us out to train, using non-elemental clones to act as if he alone were a whole team of enemy ninja coming after Shika and I.

We threw shuriken at everything that moved or rustled, sprinting in zig-zags through the Nara forest. I tripped, and Shika skidded to a stop, throwing shuriken around us to give me time to get back up.

He actually managed to disrupt one clone, but the other "enemies" had already taken the opportunity to surround us.

Shika and I stood back to back as they attacked. We both managed to deflect some of their illusionary projectiles by hitting them with our own in mid-air, but it took less than a moment before both of us were hit.

Shikaku walked back to the house with us, discussing our performance. "You're both getting better," he pronounced, finally.

I sighed. "It doesn't seem like it, though."

He placed his hand on my head, mussing up my hair. "I wouldn't have let you start taijutsu training if you hadn't proven you could handle it," he said.

I thought over all the training I'd been doing, and my mood lifted a bit. "Yeah, I guess so." Over the last four months, after I'd learned the yin chakra trick to augment my mental faculties, my study rate had increased. It was not so much that it made me smarter, but when I was practicing my chakra manipulation or one of the rudimentary jutsu while boosting with yin chakra, I was so much more _observant_. I noticed which tiny little fluctuations in my actions or manipulation of chakra were causing the effect I wished, and which weren't. And from there, it was much easier for me to refine my technique.

I'd found, though, that too many successive use of yin boosting, as I'd taken to calling it, caused headaches. That worried me, and whenever I felt one coming on, I was careful to stop and relax. I could hold a yin boost for about forty-five seconds, and repeat the feat about ten times a day before the headaches came on. I found myself quickly running through my allowance of yin-boosting every day, and taking a nap more for the purpose of refreshing my brain than because I was sleepy.

"Can I go to training with Shiowi? I've been doing good too, wight?" Shikamaru said, tugging on his father's sleeve.

"Mahh..." Shikaku looked up at the sky. "Not till you're a little older. And you'll have to prove yourself first, just like Shiori-nee."

Shika frowned. "What do I have to do?"

"Beat me...at shogi, on my level ten difficulty."

Shika's mouth dropped open. " _What_? That's not...how am...?"

Shikaku didn't even try to hide the evil grin on his face. "That's what little boys get for telling their moms I said a certain bad word in front of them the other day..."

Shika gasped in outrage, and turned to me for aid.

I shrugged helplessly.

He scowled at Shikaku. "I'm gonna beat you soon. And then...and then! I'm gonna tell okaa-chan about that time I saw you peeing on the sakura tree!"

Shikaku's eyes widened. "Shikamaru, there's no need to-"

Shika didn't stop to listen, sticking his tongue out and then racing ahead to the house, scowling the whole way.

Shikaku watched him go, then turned to me. "You don't think he'd actually tell Yoshino about that, do you?" He sounded worried, but I could see a little spark of amusement in the twitch of his lips.

"Well, if Shika doesn't, then _I_ will!" I stuck my tongue out at him, and raced after my adopted brother.

* * *

I waited for Thursday afternoon with so little patience it was almost nonexistent. I tried to spend some of my eager energy on training, but it made me even more anxious to start learning something _new_. I'd mastered fixed position leaf floating-where the hand moved but the leaf stayed floating stationary, as well as using chakra to balance a kunai unnaturally on different parts of my body, and swirling water within a glass. My chakra strings had improved, and though I had difficulty getting them to any significant length, I had started to attempt simple lock picking with chakra as my tools, which was my own modification of the exercise.

I was committed to not moving on to more advanced exercises or new jutsu till I'd truly mastered the ones I was learning, but I chafed under the boredom of my own restrictions.

On Thursday, Shikaku walked me to the entrance of Fugaku Uchiha's house, nodding lazily to the Uchiha clan members who watched us with carefully stoic faces as we passed. A servant met us, and led us around to the side of the house, where a gate opened onto a large backyard that obviously doubled as a training area.

Itachi was waiting there, doing a slow kata.

Shikaku nodded to me. "Well, I'll let you get to it, then..."

It was only after he'd walked away that I realized we hadn't made a plan for someone to pick me back up. With the ninja presence all around, children weren't usually in danger, and the presence of chakra made us less susceptible to accidental injury, so parents didn't act as protectively as I still expected. In a lot of ways, I appreciated that. But I knew Danzo existed, and I also knew there was still nothing I could do to escape him, if he happened to come after me. Maybe I could get one of the Uchiha to walk me home, if Shikaku didn't come back in time.

I sighed, and walked toward Itachi.

He straightened out of his kata, and gave me a respectful bow. "Nara-kun. It is my pleasure to meet you again."

I bowed. "Likewise, Uchiha-kun."

The edge of his mouth quirked up. "Not Uchiha- _senpai_ , I see?"

I saw no hint of actual irritation on his face, so I smirked back at him.

"Maybe you will change your mind about that, when you cannot walk tomorrow," he said stoically, though his mouth still hid a smile.

I laughed. "We'll see."

Despite his threat, Itachi started off the first day with some light cardio and not-so-light stretches, gauging my physical capacity. Then he made me tumble to the ground over and over, making sure I knew the basics of dispersing my impact and getting back to my feet as quickly as possible.

He finished the session by making sure I knew how to make a fist and throw a solid punch, then had me copy him as he bent his knees and shuffled around, his feet never quite leaving the ground. He told me that until I had passable footwork, I'd never be able to hit anyone, being so tiny.

Near the end of our session, Fugaku Uchika came out onto the huge back porch, watching silently for a few moments. He waved for us to continue, and Itachi went serious under his gaze, no more little smiles or conversation about anything beside my efforts.

I focused hard, letting just a little extra yin chakra filter through to my brain, so that I could ensure I captured and replicated his movements properly.

When we were done, Itachi and I bowed to each other, and he turned to his father expectantly.

Fugaku nodded curtesy to his son. "Continue with your own training. I will walk Nara-san home. It would be a shame if she were to become lost." He turned to me, staring hard for a moment, then walked off at full speed, obviously expecting me to follow him.

I did, doing my best to keep up without running. "Thank you for accompanying me, Uchiha-sama," I said, when we'd been walking for a few minutes.

"Hn."

Was that where Sasuke got his rude speech habits from?

"The jounin commander seems to think you have some talent," he said suddenly.

I didn't know what I was expected to say to that, so I stayed silent, concentrating on not tripping as I power-walked beside him. I probably looked ridiculous, little arms and legs swinging to their full extent, like a tiny marching soldier.

"My son has duties to his clan. If time proves that you are talentless, or _lazy_ ," he said, stretching the word out with disdain, "I assure you, you will not continue to take up his attention." He stopped and turned dark eyes on me, not so different from Shikaku's.

I bowed to him. "I will not waste Itachi-senpai's time," I said.

He nodded. "See that you do not." He turned and started walking again, leaving me straining to keep up. He left me at the entrance to the Nara section of the village, with a perfunctory, "Come again for training on Sunday. Same time."

I was sweaty and dirty, a little bemused, and just wanted to take a bath when I got home, but as soon as I walked into the house, Shika jumped up from the shogi table and ran over to give me a hug.

His face was blotchy and his eyes were a little red. "Glad you'we home," he mumbled.

"What's wrong, Shika?" I frowned. "Did you get hurt?"

"Nothing's wrong," he said. "Will you play shogi with me? I'm twaining to get better, but it's hawd to play against myself."

"Sure I will. Just give me a while to get cleaned up first."

He nodded, and went back to the shogi table.

I turned, and saw that Yoshino was watching us from the kitchen. I joined her there, and asked in a low voice, "Did something happen?"

She sighed, attacking the flour she was kneading with aggressive strength. "He wanted to go with you. He tried to sneak out and follow you and Shikaku this afternoon, but he got caught. He took it pretty hard, and then started crying because he'd 'never get good enough at shogi.' Do you know what that's about?"

"Shikaku-oji said he couldn't start training in taijutsu until Shika could beat him on level-ten difficulty," I murmured, dismayed.

"He really looks up to you... Oh!" seeing the look on my face, she knelt down and pulled me into a hug. "It's okay, Shiori-chan. This isn't your fault. People can't always do everything together, and that's okay. As long as you're there for him when you can be, and protect him with the Will of Fire, you're doing what you should be."

I nodded stiffly, though her words didn't completely assuage my guilt. Shika was my best friend in this new life, even if he was only a toddler. He wasn't one those kids who whined and cried all the time, so I knew he must have been seriously upset. I took a quick bath and changed into clean clothes, and then returned to the living room.

Shika moved to reset the pieces, but I stopped him. "It's okay, I'll just take over from here. After all, sometimes the battle's already started by the time you get there. Real life doesn't start from equal."

"Huh," he said, and nodded.

After we played for a while, I said, "Do you want to hear about my training today?"

He nodded, not taking his eyes off the board.

I relayed the training session to him, being as goofy as possible as I exaggerated my own mistakes, and how silly it was when Itachi tripped me. Which he'd done over and over, to emphasize the need for proper fall and footwork training.

By the end, Shika was giggling, but he sobered again. "I twied to sneak out and go with you, but I'm not good at stealth yet."

I hesitated awkwardly. "You'll get to start taijutsu soon, too, you know. You're not even three yet."

He frowned. "But by then, you'll be good alweady! You won't want to play ninja or twain with me any more when I'm just a stupid baby who doesn't know how to do taijutsu! Hamawi from down the street said so, and then Tatami said his older bwother never played with him any more after he joined the Academy and now-"

Ah. "No!" I said, knocking already bruised thighs into the table as I stood abruptly. "That's not going to happen with you and me, Shika. Hamari is a stupid idiot who doesn't know what she's talking about. And I'm not like Tatami's older brother. It's okay if I get better at you for a little bit in taijutsu. You're better than me at shogi! And you don't want to stop playing with me just because I almost never win against you, right?"

His eyes widened, and he shook his head slowly. "No. I still want to play with you. Even if I can beat you at shogi. So...you'll still want to play with me, even if you do get way better at taijutsu? And you won't tell me I can't play with you and the other kids because I'm more little and small than you?"

"Promise," I said, holding out my hand with my pinky extended.

He looked at my hand in confusion.

"It's the promise-seal," I said, making it up on the spot, when I realized I didn't know if pinky-promises were a thing in this world. "It's like the seal of confrontation or reconciliation. We wind our pinky fingers together, and if you make a promise with the seal, you can never break it, or you lose your honor."

His eyes widened. He stuck out his own pinky, and wrapped it around my own. "I won't stop playing with you, even if you are bad at some things and I'm good."

I repeated the words back to him, and he beamed back at me. I hoped my version of Shikamaru never lost his ability to _care_ so hard.

* * *

4/12/18: I hope you enjoyed this chapter. I'm running up on the deadline for releasing the third book in my published GameLit/LitRPG series, Gods of Myth and Midnight. This story will have to go on hiatus for a couple months as I rush to get it published, since I need money to live. I will be back after that with more chapters. Thanks, as always, to those of you who've left a review, favorited, or followed this story.


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